8/31/18

USA Has About the Same Income Inequality as Mexico

The United States and Mexico now share the same degree of income inequality. The GINI coefficient; a measurement of income inequality and concentration of wealth, has each nation at about .48. A score of 0 is complete equality and a score of 1 means that one individual has all of the wealth of a nation.

Russia rates a .42, South Africa .62, Taiwan .33, India .35, Canada .33, Ukraine, .28 and Japan and Israel .37

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equality

For a leader of the free world the United States isn't a great example of income equality or managing a federal budget well.

Probably the Clintons are responsible for the situation as they emptied the field of Democrat candidates of quality for decades as if they were gas giant planets destroying any small travelling comets or asteroids in the area with the powerful gravity.

Making income equality great again, equal to the gilded age of the roaring twenties (1920s) is happening now. Public debt is only 21 trillion dollars though. There is a silver lining in every dark cloud.

8/30/18

Evolving Democracy in Russia- a revised article


Answers:

Russian public involvement is an evolving affair since the end of the former Soviet Union with it's dictatorship of the proletariat, or communist party member elites that ruled by decree with authoritarianism, it appeared to outside observers. The change to democracy is one of the most remarkable stories of modern history, since it largely occurred peacefully. Enterprising Russians moved around the world into free market ventures to a certain extent, including the United States, as well as a few chess GMs. It is a frontier of political change with an imperfect script in a play that hasn't yet been finished.
1) “What are inclusive institutions in contemporary Russia?”
Human social organizations that are open to membership could be regarded as inclusive. I was influenced in defining organizational inclusiveness from Jean Paul Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason. Within Sartre’s organizational paradigm there is a phenomenal or existential element for an organization. Inherently an organization has the capacity for ad hoc change and reform. Therefore the set of organizations that exist in Russia today that are inclusive should not be narrowly defined. I would like to include business organizations as inclusive as well as government and quasi-governmental agencies that interact positively with the general public.
Urban areas have more organizations than rural because there are more people in urban areas. Governing powers coordination centers are located in urban areas generally, as well as the people, financial centers are located in urban areas too so that is where organizations seek access to government monetary resources develop too.
Fortunately this course is structured for beginners in the subject of governance in Russia. I haven’t been to Russia- Helsinki was as close as I have been, so research into the topic of Russian organizations that exist and are inclusive in Russia brought me to several obvious Internet sites providing, indirectly, information about the state of Russia development since the end of the Cold War and in particular since the year 2000.
Humans can organize to help themselves and to improve their living conditions unless it is legally outlawed. Business is one of the more efficient ways to do so. Business models are malleable and adaptive regarding membership and may include ownership co-ops, joint partnerships and incorporation. The may be dedicated to virtually any purpose, and especially as corporations may be for-profit or non-profit. The Council on Foundations appears to be an inclusive venue for forming sundry forms of organizations and interactive deliberative structures including non-profits.
The website above lists five most-common kinds of existing organizations in Russia that international grant makers encounter:
“Public organizations;
1. Foundations;
2. Institutions;
3. Autonomous non-commercial organizations; and
4. Associations (unions).”
The site https://gosuslugi.ru
seems to be a good point to find numerous services for citizens in Russia. It is “an official Internet portal for government services” and appears to have quite a substantive on-line listing of useful urls. Some of the services, for example, obtaining documents or information regarding water, may require a fee.
Below I will make a list of several Internet indexed sites that are relevant to the topic of inclusive social organizations in Russia including business sites.
http://rushmarket.com/ Russian business websites
https://www.oidp.net/docs/  includes a brief history of initiative budgeting
https://www.forskningsradet. "Local government budgeting reforms in Russia: implications and tensions"
https://www.ned.org/region/   Russian 2017 budget including citizen initiative support
https://truthout.org/articles/  -public votes on how to spend a pot of money


2) “Examples of Civic Engagement”
Street protests are civic engagement, although a raucous and crude sort. The e-government sites of the state allow civic engagement. Social media allows free expression.
I stipulate that I am somewhat skeptical of the value of social media and the Internet for actual striking of a spark for positive legislation. Entire websites can disappear, or accounts banned by commercial interests. Power can find a way to lever into darkness any bright Internet lights that are inconvenient for the insider political agenda.
Russia may lack the existence of binding citizen referendum at the local an federal levels that could be used to engage political activism and popular opinions with legislative action. The absence of referenda and plebiscites that are meaningful and able to become law to supplement normal legislation creates too much detachment between citizens and representative legislative instutions.
Professor Grigori Kliucharev has interesting things to say about civic engagement in this report. One learns that ‘twenty-six percent of Russians do not believe civic participation will change anything’ (paraphrased.)
Aleksandr Sherstobitov of St Petersburg University, Department of Governance, published an article about social media and its support for citizen engagement and reform oriented activism, including the development of non-governmental organizations engaging citizens for motivating government policy improvement and “civil initiatives of different areas: election observation, anti-corruption activity and local issues, etc.”
https://www.gosuslugi.ru/category a government services website for Russian
One may define civic engagement in numerous ways. If one specifically chooses for the term to mean how the government engages with citizens instead of being somewhat insular and aloof, then the range of possible answers might exclude numerous examples of citizen self-organizing. The sovereign governmental power of a nation is what is challenged historically from within and without. Those in a position to run a government as authorities sometimes repress dissent. Russia has opposition parties such as The Other Russia. For observers from afar t may be difficult to identify the actual identity of the players for opposition parties that probably are composed of people with diverse political interests while, alternatively, President Putin is mostly interested in keeping opposition parties within the boundaries of certain general political criteria that would include basic agreement with principles of democracy, private property, and several other traditional western civilization values.

3) “In what cases we can see the real deliberation in contemporary Russia? What are the key factors?”
The meaning of the term deliberation is somewhat amorphous for me. A dictionary definition is “slow and careful movement or thought”. One might expect to find that in courts, or in government agencies charges with management of public safety so they would develop plans and methods of how to accomplish such goals.
Deliberative democracy was described as citizen-participation in consensus building that shapes public policy. Apparently though the government insiders may regard the opinions as optional and disregard it. Public opinion can be as irrelevant as the Duma in some years if it is in disagreement with the chief executive. I would think binding referenda and initiative elections that may only be overturned by a constitutional court or the President have a necessary role in democracy.
One would expect some government agencies to plan support for free enterprise economics and to assure the well being of the people of the nation, and to find ways to bring equal protection of the laws and equal justice to citizens and guests such as legal residents.
Tax policies in Russia might be given as an example of deliberation since they have been worked upon and upgraded or revised, pejoratively, over the history of post-Soviet Russia. Russian space policies have continued to provide support for the International Space Station, and when a Soyuz attached to the Station recently started leaking air because a micro-meteorite impacted and punctured it, there was a plan to tape the leak closed in place. Apparently there is a plan to use the Soyuz to return astronauts or cosmonauts to Russia; one hopes it does not become a convertible on the way. Evidently there is some sort of an engineering plan to repair the spacecraft enough to use it safely one more time.
The Federal Assembly of Russia has a history as a real deliberative body. They have rejected legislation before that was in disagreement with the preferred alternative of the President. The President after some revision usually has his way eventually. In the United States the legislature is free to lead whatever way global corporations and the most wealthy want. They may stray in certain respects, yet they will continue to uphold the inertia generally of the way things are and assuredly never reform capitalism at all nor bring the government into a direction that is in support of sustainable ecological economics. In my opinion plutocracy is the emerging global trend, though it tends to synergize at the top levels with the market and shared economic interests of the Chinese Communist Party therefor, to a certain extent, the sanctions regime of the United States and Europe ostensibly over the Ukraine and Crimea, have isolated Russia sufficiently to enable the Russia a certain liberty and independence form the developing global plutocracy.
I would think that the International situation vis Russia does affect the state’s ability to liberalize some areas of domestic policy, and of course, international economics opportunity. Protest movements tend these days to have nominal goals with ulterior motives, and they are international and commonly supported, at least some of the larger movements, by the American broadcast media , and that distorts politics from a normative development to the real-politk synthesis with the media as an agent of acceleration.
Corruption in government is destructive obviously, and one of the worst effects is to drive out public participation in governing policy. Yet one must recall that an overly powerful state was the problem for Russians in the Soviet era and reducing the power of the state while maintaining the economic vital interests and health of Russian in their working years and retirement era is challenging. If the state can reduce itself in size yet maintain the role of economic enabler of ecological economics and public economic well being it would be good, and better if it were possible to do so without public corruption while international sanctions exist.

4) “Just the imitation of inclusion and deliberation? Why?”
Opposition parties today have certain methods for public protests. Social media is one avenue of expressing suggestions for change and to make criticism. Traditional organizations that belie the real interests of the constituency of the parties may arise anywhere including Russia. If communists comprise a continuing substantial portion of the population of Russia the goals of some nominally market supporting party politics could actually be a restoration of state socialism. Since President Putin’s record as President generally is one for the advancement of market economics he might be wary of political developments that would support a recrudescence of communist power. Therefore one requires a degree of skepticism about political leaders in opposition parties actually expressing the true opinions of their followers.
One report states that Russia ranks 37 of 38 nations regarding stakeholder participation in legislation.
That isn’t very good, yet the circumstances of Russian history probably accounts for that; there hasn’t been so much time since the end of the Soviet state to train people in do-it-yourself aspects of democracy. The Soviet state could send a citizen to the Gulag for having a piece of bread in one’s pocket, Alexander Solzhenitsyn mentioned, in The Gulag Archipelago.
The Moscow Times published an article stating that 450 members of the Duma served in the military and that 86 of those were lobbyists for the Defense industry. That would tend to create much support for favorable spending for the military rather than the civil sector. Russia probably could use hyper-tubes for transportation of civilians, yet military priorities may occlude such civil developments if the Russia federal budget is like that of the U.S.A. that spends even more than Russia on defense.
Opposition party leaders criticize state corruption and cronyism. For instance President Putin apparently appointed a friend tor subordinate o lead the Russian National Guard. One might expect a President to appoint someone that is completely trustworthy to such an important position, so I am uncertain if that would qualify for as corruption. Perhaps in an ideal and developed, stable democratic and market founded society it would not be common to appoint friends or relatives to high political office, yet is Russia there yet? It is difficult to cast stones if living in a glass house; President Kennedy appointed his brother Robert to be Attorney General, and I am sure there are numerous other examples of something like nepotism in the political history of the United States.
Garry Kasparov and Alexei Navalny are two political leaders from opposition parties that would seem prima facie to be moderate reform-minded candidates for the Presidency of Russia that were interfered with by the Putin Administration and its supporters from running for the job. That would be an example of fake deliberation or opportunity to run for the office of President. It may be that President Putin has had to act as a kind of Platonic Philosopher-King for some time to Shepard the developing Russian state and to keep it within certain rational boundaries for development.
The appearance of the philosopher-king in the unexpected person of former President Boris Yeltsin was a remarkable historical occurrence. Apparently the philosopher-king may be a necessary tool for developing a government that involves the redistribution of a broken up government within an already existing society that has transitioned to a degree into chaos. Maybe it is comparable to military governors such as Douglas MacArthur in post-war Japan who provided much input on reform the Japanese government. It is probably at best a temporary role that the successful n of what coincide with the vacating of the special powers subsumed within an emerging stable democratic platform.
Yet the question arises; is President Putin the sole politician capable of serving in the Presidential philosopher-king role, and wouldn’t it at some point be better for public credibility if opposition party candidates that could continue a program of free enterprise and ecologically reasonable economic policies and security concerns be allowed to actually run and get elected, if the people chose to elect one?
Because free and fair elections are at the heart of democracy, credible and fair, representative government and elections held with, by and for the benefit of the people are requisite events that need to supported recurrently y government officials. Reform of a government, or continuing development of government and its institutions need to self-directed and managed by the people and real representative government if it is to evolve a democratic nature. There is some concern today, perhaps more so by outsiders, that Russia and its government is not working in that direction. Yet like the Pope I might say; who am I to judge?
The nature of Russian governmental political evolution is very remarkable. Probably never before has such a vast redistribution of wealth; public wealth occurred. Public wealth has been privatized and reallocated to private interest largely, and without much violence. People wonder if the redistribution was fair, and also wonder how fair it need be, and what fairness is exactly, since a key difference between communism and capitalism is the unequal distribution of wealth. Reasonable people like to keep the differences from becoming extreme and oppressive where individuals are reduced to degrading and dangerous social positions and lifestyles.
Because of world ecospheric challenges to the survival of the planet’s ecosphere, and because capitalism hasn’t been philosophically reformed since Adam Smith’s 1776 publication of The Wealth of Nations, it is fine to innovate and adapt different democratic criteria for a capitalist economy than has previously existed. One may limit the size of corporations to 5000 and ban owning shares of more than three corporations by any private citizen in order to prevent oligarchy or plutonomy. One may have a guaranteed minimum income and eliminate redundant social welfare benefits. It is possible to unify a veterans hospital network with public clinics for the poor to serve millions, and it may be reasonable for public screening of start-up corporations to determine if they have acceptable ecological harmlessness criteria much less benefit t rate a go ahead with special tax brackets. It is possible to encourage with tax breaks those unemployed the longest time to be first hired by employers. The goals of inclusion should be to better the life and liberty of the ordinary citizen and find avenues for the exceptional to advance, and that can be encouraged by government as well as the private sector.

Putin, Trump and Obama Gut or Cut Progressive Taxes


President Putin, Trump and Obama cut taxes or won't support progressive taxes.

Cutting taxes is popular these days. Besides socialists no one wants to increase taxes. Conservatives like to increase military spending while cutting taxes. Insufficient means testing for social entitlement programs basically means reductions in social spending don’t happen in the U.S. budget much ether except for those most weak and unable to afford lobbyists.

https://www.polygraph.info/a/fact-check-putin-russia-petirement-age-/29460246.html

https://www.thebalance.com/obama-tax-cuts-3306330

https://www.businessinsider.com/workers-wages-have-been-flat-to-lower-since-the-trump-tax-cuts-2018-8

If one had to pay for the federal government without running a deficit, maybe people might think its a good policy to be friendly enough with Russia and China to enable all parties to reduce defense spending. Military procurement items don’t last forever. They become obsolete and stale too. It's probably better to spend on new civil infrastructure and very fast tube trains than on shelved military items with an expiration date (exception for B-52s of course that are good one century).

Russia has a flat tax for personal income at 13%. That would make Steve Forbes happy I would get. The corporate tax rate is 20%. VAT taxes (on imports) are 18%.  Russia probably can't afford to run a vast left and right wing federal deficit, yet the state has it's own oil wells to help pay for government.

Frege, Hilbert; Logic and Mathematical Universe Hypothesis

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has an interesting article on a logic debate or dialogue between the originator of symbolic logic; one Gottlob Frege, and the great German mathematician David Hilbert who helped Einstein find the right math for the General Theory of Relativity. After Einstein asked Hilbert for help, Hilbert actual solved the equations for the theory before Einstein (who did so with help from Hilbert independently).

The Logic question concerns the nature of mathematics axioms; in brief, does consistency prove existence? The questions informs one about the nature of existence of the Universe in some respects; for mathematics can be used to model quantum mechanics with a kind of exhaustive reducibility in theory. From a certain point of view energy and matter can be regarded as accreted around mathematical points; humans can view nature as built up from math-geometry, algebra etc, and for the spiritually inclined the foundation for mathematics that is itself just a concept or idea, is spirit.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypothesis


https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/frege-hilbert/

Here is an excerpt from the Standford philosophy article; "The central difference between Frege and Hilbert over the nature of axioms, i.e., over the question whether axioms are determinately true claims about a fixed subject-matter or reinterpretable sentences expressing multiply-instantiable conditions, lies at the heart of the difference between an older way of thinking of theories, exemplified by Frege, and a new way that gathered strength at the end of the nineteenth century. Perhaps most clearly illustrated in Dedekind 1888, the central idea of the new approach is to understand mathematical theories as characterizing general “structural” conditions that might be had in common by any number of different ordered domains. Just as, in algebra, the axioms for a group give general conditions that can be satisfied by any manner of object whatsoever under appropriate relations, so too on the new view the axioms of geometry specify multiply-instantiable conditions. Viewing theories from this modern perspective, it is entirely appropriate to take axioms as Hilbert does, since reinterpretable sentences are the right vehicles to express the multiply-instantiable conditions in question.[8] From the point of view of the earlier fixed-domain conception of theories, on the other hand, such reinterpretable sentences are entirely inappropriate as axioms, since they fail to fix a determinate subject-matter. On this question, i.e., the issue of the fixed-domain (Fregean) vs. multiply-instantiable structure (Hilbertian) conception of mathematical theories, the jury is still out: this debate continues to animate contemporary philosophy of mathematics (see entry on philosophy of mathematics).

The second issue that divides Frege and Hilbert, regarding the justifiability of the inference from consistency to existence, is also still alive. While everybody (including presumably Hilbert) would agree with Frege that outside of the mathematical domain we cannot safely infer existence from consistency, the question remains whether we can (or must) do so within mathematics. The Fregean point of view is that the existence of mathematical objects can only be proven (if at all) by appeal to more fundamental principles, while the Hilbertian point of view is that in appropriate purely-mathematical cases, there is nothing more to be demonstrated, in order to establish existence, than the consistency of a theory (see entries on philosophy of mathematics and Platonism in the philosophy of mathematics)."

If History Conflicts With Scripture; Whose Fault Is That?

I haven’t found scripture to be in conflict with history. There was a philosopher named Ludwig Wittgenstein who developed a concept he called the indeterminacy of translation. I believe that people including theologians often misunderstand scripture. The reader’s ‘translation’ into there brain isn’t an exhaustive source of what scripture refers to.

I will try to illustrate what I mean. Say for example, that one has a report with words referring to historical events in ancient proto-Russia in the day of Yaroslav about 1000 a.d. The report found in Kiev- where Russia started, says that A, B and C were powerful symbols of Viking power.
So a modern theologian reading the report trying to understand how the orthodox church originated in Slavic countries, ‘translates’ the literal text into his brain, reading it. He uses his understanding of what he read in a Sunday sermon.

“I could find no evidence of Orthodox Christianity in ancient Kievan Rus. Instead the people worshiped A,B and C as well as Thor and Wooden. Only later did St. Cyril arrive in Russia to create Cyrillic alphabet with the gospel encoded within his homiletic apologetics. We must not make the same mistake of seeking to dominate Ultima Thule with literary literalism aboard spacecraft bound for the Kyper Belt.”

Well, we know as archival historians that A,B and C referred to Alpha, Bob and Charlie; three vikings that savaged Dniepr River settlements plundering them for booze and women. They were not religious symbols at all. That’s an example of the indeterminacy of translation. The events and the order they occurred in are greatly different than the language that refers to them. It is not possible to recapitulate with accuracy the complete complex of compresent events of a particular space-time locality of the past with scripture about it. It is naive to believe one can.

Scripture is unerringly true; it is human interpretation that is incorrect. Historians also are susceptible to making historical evaluations with incomplete information leading to inaccuracy.

A good example of the indeterminacy of translation today in the theological field involves the controversy of when the Biblical apocalypse occurred. Some such as Rev PhD Kenneth Gentry believe it already happened in the first century A.D. (I agree). Others believe it is yet to happen; those are pre-millennialists. I am fairly sure they are wrong.

He Shall Have Dominion: A Postmillennial Eschatology (Third Edition: Revised & Expanded): Kenneth L. Gentry Jr.: 9780977851676: Amazon.com: Books

Another example is in the field of creation and Genesis. There are numerous ways to interpret scripture. That is called hermeneutics. Interpreting ancient scripture at best can determine an accurate use of what the words meant in the day. What the words referred to as symbols and what the actual events were, are to a certain extent, beyond the capacity of language implicitly. Hollywood can make movies about Biblical times yet of course the reality generally wasn’t anything like that.
God, Cosmology and Nothingness - Theory and Theology In a Scientific Era (free download)

8/29/18

Indian Game- 3M Blitz

       An Indian game. Playing black I missed a mate in one...blitz.


What to Do About John McCain's Posthumous Glory Naming


The late Senator John McCain probably should have retired 15 years ago. Senators with brain cancer simply have impaired judgment. The brain doesn’t support thought in the same way with cancer as it does without. Probably the subconscious is altered substantially.

Fox news decided to award a medal of honor to the late Senator for being a P.O.W. and staying in the Hanoi Hilton even when his North Vietnamese captors tortured him to try to get him to leave and go home. Plainly that is worthy of a medal of honor.

Yet medals all around could be awarded to the congress just for being there to debate renaming the Russell Office Building the McCain Senate Office Building. They to can share the glory of being p.o.w.s as they are in a sense captive to the federal debt.

Senator McCain’s legacy of disregarding flight instructions to get to low and shot down, breaking his jaw while escaping his aircraft, being bayoneted by a Vietnamese soldier and being tortured into leaving which he refused was far beyond the conduct of his fellow p.o.w.s Maybe all of those people incarcerated by the enemy should get medals for valor from the Congress and a nice check too.

The Russell Office Build should be renamed the McKinley Office Building, or the Martin Luther King Office Building, or the Robert F. Kennedy Office Building and John McCain should just get an aircraft carrier with his name on it. It he is flying around anywhere in spirit, he might land on that.

Answer to Why Pres Trump Doesn't Wear a Beard

In California it can be regarded as uncool to have a mustache. Some believe it’s chauvinist. That could be a minority opinion though-maybe there should be a poll on the topic.

President Trump is more of a New York kind of guy than a grizzly Adams fellow. Yet if he has a substantive percent of Cherokee blood, like Senator Warren, he might not be able to grow a good beard, although that might be legendary rather than accurate.

Though the Donald is the living fulfillment of Frank Sinatra’s song ‘New York, New York’- a veritable Barbarossa in the flesh, if President Trump wants to win California next time, maybe he should grow a bushy beard and wear torn Levis to L.A. (if his star is restored) to show that he respects casual Fridays too.




A Paradigm for National Sovereignty and Globalism in the Future

Sovereign governments and nations are simply organizations exercising and reflecting the will of people for self-governance, within a criterion of democracy. Sovereignty for others may mean living in a subjective state as something like a captive or prisoner of an elite or authority.

A country is a word; a name, an abstract concept more or less equivalent to the word domain. Domain etymologically was from the Latin word dominus, meaning ‘Lord’. In my opinion the world shall have sovereign peoples of some form or other even against the jejune paradigm of one world government as the governance-for-others sought after by leftists, communists, socialist, dictators oddball religions and megalomaniacs of all sorts.

Economic powers with instant telecommunications tend to evolve plutocracy rather than democracy, since there are advantaged capitalists and elites able to lever the abstract tools to buy everything and to finesse the world’s billions to work for them. The power of elite wealth to end self-determination by national democracies is a clear and present evolving situation. Already it is difficult to imagine the reform of capitalism toward a new ecological sustainability foundation as crass materialism made popular by the social and broadcast media drives the billions of souls toward consumerism and blind allegiance to the succor of globalism under plutocrats and communist elites.

In the future social dynamics will tend to disrupt the constant political thermodynamics of stable power structures as they have over history, even as history evolved political forms and technology concurrently. Reorganization of a global state, that should be avoided to start with, would tend to be a greater disaster than managed. local troubles. Firewalls within a structure exist for a reason though some would like to remove them, and other remove them as obstructions to wealth development.

As humanity moves off-world sovereign powers may return to be the normal condition as self-reliance and cohesive organization of millions of souls wold be requisite with other authorities possibly light years distant. There are some very strong and beneficial points to local and sustainable democratic self-reliance that are lost in a globally homogeneous culture.

8/28/18

Adolph Hitler; Left, Right or Center

Adolph Hitler wasn’t fundamentally a political ideologue. He wasn’t very well educated. His ideas were the sort that are somewhat populist and street. People develop such ideas with a kind of intellectual feminism that hasn’t the genius of intellectual vigor. Physical rather than intellectual development is the rule, and that can be dangerous in leaders.
Hitler inherited an anti-intellectual tradition that General Hindenberg (later to lead the Weimar Republic until appointing Hitler to lead) established; he bragged that he had never read a book. Hitler’s origin and personal history can’t be ignored; it shaped his mature outlook on life. The First World War affected his opinions. He won an Iron Cross as a messenger on the battlefield. He was gassed and hospitalized and recovering when the armistice happened. The news gave him a relapse into what people regard as hysteria-induced blindness. Hitler and the veterans generally didn’t believe the war was really lost and that they had been betrayed by leftists and communists. Kaiser Wilhelm II was given an ultimatum to abdicate or there would be a popular revolution because he had been regarded by the German public as losing the war. He quit the job and left for Belgium.
There were some prominent Jews in leadership positions in the near-revolution. One had spoken at the Munich beer hall where Hitler would later lead the Beer Hall Putsch. Hitler found it easy to blame the Jews for the armistice and revolution, He was wrong about that though. Hitler also blamed communists for the revolution- they were very active in Germany. When the Russian Revolution happened near the end of World War One the Red visage to the east affected popular opinions.
However it was the German leadership that sent Lenin in a sealed train east to Russia where they knew he would lead the revolution. Probably they had some secret agreement with Lenin to be given the Ukraine in exchange for allowing Lenin to return to Germany and not to invade the new communist state after the revolution. Lenin did sign the treaty of Brest-Litovsk after destroying Russia and creating the Soviet Union. Germany owned most of Ukraine until Hitler lost it to the Soviets himself after invading Russia.
Hitler was sent to take over the National Socialist Workers Party by the Wehrmacht leadership. With the aristocracy deposed the 1% needed to restore their position in some way, and Hitler was the key to creating a corporatist government that would let the former aristocracy unite with government at the top level through business. His desire to be a new Caesar was just following the tradition of the Kaiser. Karl Rohm led S.A. Storm Troopers helped let Hitler take over German society and end the republic. Hitler's Storm Troopers: A History of the SA: The Memoirs of Wilfred von Oven
Hitler was a great, charismatic speaker able to lead the populace with a vision of a restored Aryan Germany purified of all of those that had brought Germany to lose the first world war that they could have won if the armistice had not been signed. Hitler was damaged by the war and not the best and brightest in the first place. A peaceful Germany with it’s scientific and engineering brilliance had all it needed. The uneducated veteran of the great war saw nothing besides expansion materially and killing hypothetical opponents.
Corporatism as a political philosophy co-opts the left socialist movement and grafts it into the Aristocratic/Corporate 1%’s will to power. Benito Mussolini invented it, and Hitler used it.
Communists on the left were the enemy. The right of the day and post-hoc are considered to be the fascists/Nazis, that initially were a leftist party. Neither side were U.S. founder style constitutional liberals that are today thought of as conservatives. In a way people never really know what left and right mean outside of a present context. One should use linguistic philosophy and a paradigm like Kripke’s naming and necessity to understand well that the meaning of words can change yet keep a little lasting meaning in some respects. Left and Right just cannot replace a good historical understanding of the people and events, circumstance and pressures, opportunities and challenges that led particular political situations to exist.

Search Engines May be Unfair to Conservative and Independent Bloggers

President Trump is concerned about the power of Internet search engines over what people see in the political realm. Plainly search engines like Google have the power to gerrymander search results to put up their own political views if they wish. If they don’t choose to do so, or if that never occurred to them, that would be good.

Americans aren't exactly monkey see, monkey do people yet there are a lot of people that follow current trends to go with front runners.  If the left-leaning media is featured, rather than articles from The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy or whatever, that will influence what people believe is important. Preferred locations for business such as Wal-mart along freeways bring in customers and so do preferred internet locations; hence people pay Google to get a better search engine result for their web page. Free and fair Internet listings that aren't repressed or disadvantaged by an algorithm are meaningful concepts for those with web pages,

It required a couple of months of using the google filter before I could get rid of CNN articles from the news feed. The top listings were invariably the usual suspects; The Washington Post, CNN, CNBC, Vanity Fare, The Atlantic and so forth; all left leaning Democrat Party supporting entities. Besides Fox, and Fox is weak on conservativism and foreign owned, the conservative point of view was non-existent. The filter out the source button at google news just did not work; eventually I wrote a blog article about the topic and after that it stopped. 

I used to get a thousand views on my blog many days before President Obama took office, then after a few years the views crashed overnight to fewer than 100 where it remains, I tend to support President Trump.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-news-on-google-is-rigged-against-him/

It seems to me that the Internet search engines do hire a lot of Democrats with easy access to programming opportunities to marginalize blogs that post opinions they don’t like,burying them so they are in a dark, distant place. The ability to influence elections that multinational search engines have is substantial. How equal opportunity and political ‘net neutrality’ could be forced upon search engines is beyond my constitutional law knowledge.

The better solution would be if their were conservative, independent, libertarian as well as corrupting Democrat search engines, so anyone could duplicate their posts to a friendly site if need be.

If Lend-Lease to Stalin in WW 2 Hadn't Happened

That is a very good question. it is an interesting fiction scenario to consider. Without lend-lease the Soviet Union would have lost the eastern front of the war, and perhaps the western allied forces too on the west. That would be a result of a quick victory of operation Barbarossa in Russia; the Nazi army wouldn’t have needed the solders and material it did to keep fighting the Red Army reinforced with British and American equipment.
In just part of 1941 the Soviets lost more than 20,000 tanks leaving fewer than 700 to defend Moscow. Britain provided lots of tanks and other supplies then before the U.S.A. got fully ramped up to send material.
For the Battle of Moscow the allies had sent 700 aircraft to the Reds. By the middle of 1942 they had sent appx 2000 tanks. Other stuff like metal cutting equip probably helped.
Soviet General Zhukov said after the war; “"Now they say that the allies never helped us, but it can't be denied that the Americans gave us so many goods without which we wouldn't have been able to form our reserves and continue the war," 
"We didn’t have explosives, gunpowder. We didn’t have anything to charge our rifle cartridges with. The Americans really saved us with their gunpowder and explosives. And how much sheet steel they gave us! How could we have produced our tanks without American steel? But now they make it seem as if we had an abundance of all that. Without American trucks we wouldn’t have had anything to pull our artillery with."
The Soviet Communists dominated Russia, and their power in Eastern Europe lasted a half century; a reasonable amount of time for any nation that has lost 20–30 million dead to foreign invaders to occupy lands invaded by their enemy to assure that the danger is past. If it was the United States they probably would have kept the land for a century before thinking about letting go.
One would have had to realistically consider the Nazis dominating Russia and liquidating more inferior people; not just profiled democrats, but oddball liberals of all kinds. The Soviets absorbed punishment and casualties from the Werhmacht yet caused a lot of German casualties in defense. It is possible that without the Soviets fighting on the Eastern front the Nazi might have won on the western front.
A quote from the webpage above; “More than 14,000 U.S. airplanes, 8,000 of which came from Alaska, were given to the Soviet Union in the course of the war.
The USSR received a total of 44,000 American jeeps, 375,883 cargo trucks, 8,071 tractors and 12,700 tanks. Additionally, 1,541,590 blankets, 331,066 liters of alcohol, 15,417,000 pairs of army boots, 106,893 tons of cotton, 2,670,000 tons of petroleum products and 4,478,000 tons of food supplies made their way into the Soviet Union.”
The better way to prevent communism in Russia was in World War I; if the United States had not fought against the Germans then, or if Germany were doing well in the war, Germany might not have sent Lenin to guide the revolution. Why they did isn’t too mysterious; they didn’t trust the tsar not to repeat a war on Germany (my guess), and Lenin arranged to give the Ukraine to Germany in exchange for German help in getting the revolution (the sealed train) going and peace. If Germany were winners in the first war Hitler wouldn’t have risen to power and the Nazis would not have existed. German hegemony over Russia would have created a different, though not perhaps a better political world.

Vladimir Putin; Philosopher-King


An assignment in progress...

Module Five Essay Assignment;
Inclusive institutions and civic engagement in contemporary Russia: deliberation or imitation?”

1) “What are inclusive institutions in contemporary Russia?”
2) “What are examples of civic engagement?”
3) “In what cases we can see the real deliberation in contemporary Russia? What are the key factors?”
4) “What cases are just the imitation of inclusion and deliberation? Why?”

Answers:

1) “What are inclusive institutions in contemporary Russia?”

Human social organizations that are open to membership could be regarded as inclusive. I was influenced in defining organizational inclusiveness from Jean Paul Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason. Within Sartre’s organizational paradigm there is a phenomenal or existential element for an organization. Inherently an organization has the capacity for ad hoc change and reform. Therefore the set of organizations that exist in Russia today that are inclusive should not be narrowly defined. I would like to include business organizations as inclusive as well as government and quasi-governmental agencies that interact positively with the general public.

Urban areas have more organizations than rural because there are more people in urban areas. Governing powers coordination centers are located in urban areas generally, as well as the people, financial centers are located in urban areas too so that is where organizations seek access to government monetary resources develop too.

Fortunately this course is structured for beginners in the subject of governance in Russia. I haven’t been to Russia- Helsinki was as close as I have been, so research into the topic of Russian organizations that exist and are inclusive in Russia brought me to several obvious Internet sites providing, indirectly, information about the state of Russia development since the end of the Cold War and in particular since the year 2000.

Humans can organize to help themselves and to improve their living conditions unless it is legally outlawed. Business is one of the more efficient ways to do so. Business models are malleable and adaptive regarding membership and may include ownership co-ops, joint partnerships and incorporation. The may be dedicated to virtually any purpose, and especially as corporations may be for-profit or non-profit. The Council on Foundations appears to be an inclusive venue for forming sundry forms of organizations and interactive deliberative structures including non-profits.


The website above lists five most-common kinds of existing organization in Russia that international grant makers encounter:

Public organizations;
1. Foundations;
2. Institutions;
3. Autonomous non-commercial organizations; and
4. Associations (unions).
seems to be a good point to find numerous services for citizens in Russia. It is “an official Internet portal for government services” and appears to have quite a substantive on-line listing of useful urls. Some of the services, for example, obtaining documents or information regarding water, may require a fee.

Following I will make a list of several Internet indexed sites that are relevant to the topic of inclusive social organizations in Russia including business sites.




http://rusmarket.com/ Russian business websites



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Russian_websites



https://www.oidp.net/docs/  includes a brief history of initiative budgeting

https://www.forskningsradet. "Local government budgeting reforms in Russia: implications and tensions"

https://www.ned.org/region/  Russian 2017 budget including citizen initiative support



https://truthout.org/articles/  -public votes on how to spend a pot of money






2) “Examples of Civic Engagement”

One may define civic engagement in numerous ways. If one specifically chooses for the term to mean how the government engages with citizens instead of being somewhat insular and aloof, then the range of possible answers might exclude numerous examples of citizen self-organizing. The sovereign governmental power of a nation is what is challenged historically from within and without. Those in a position to run a government as authorities sometimes repress dissent. Russia has opposition parties such as The Other Russia. For observers from afar t may be difficult to identify the actual identity of the players for opposition parties that probably are composed of people with diverse political interests while, alternatively, President Putin is mostly interested in keeping opposition parties within the boundaries of certain general political criteria that would include basic agreement with principles of democracy, private property, and several other traditional western civilization values.

3) “In what cases we can see the real deliberation in contemporary Russia? What are the key factors?”



4) “Just the imitation of inclusion and deliberation? Why?”
Opposition parties today have certain attack methods and social media and traditional organizational means that belie the real goals of the constituency of the parties, in some cases one might infer. If communist comprise a continuing substantial portion of the population of Russia the goals may be fundamentally in conflict with those of the principles of western democracy, as would fascism, and for that matter, corporatism and socialism. Therefore one requires a degree of skepticism about political leaders in opposition parties actually expressing the true opinions of their followers.
Garry Kasparov and Alexei Navalny are two political leaders from opposition parties that would seem prima facie to be moderate reform-minded candidates for the Presidency of Russia that were interfered with by the Putin Administration and its supporters from running for the job. That would be an example of fake deliberation or opportunity to run for the office of President. It may be that President Putin has had to act as a kind of Platonic Philosopher-King for some time to Shepard the developing Russian state and to keep it within certain rational boundaries for development.

The appearance of the philosopher-king in the unexpected person of former President Boris Yeltsin was a remarkable historical occurrence. Apparently the philosopher-king may be a necessary tool for developing a government that involves the redistribution of a broken up government within an already existing society that has transitioned to a degree into chaos. Maybe it is comparable to military governors such as Douglas MacArthur in post-war Japan who provided much input on reform the Japanese government. It is probably at best a temporary role that the successful n of what coincide with the vacating of the special powers subsumed within an emerging stable democratic platform.

Yet the question arises; is President Putin the sole politician capable of serving in the Presidential philosopher-king role, and wouldn’t it at some point be better for public credibility if opposition party candidates that could continue a program of free enterprise and ecologically reasonable economic policies and security concerns be allowed to actually run and get elected, if the people chose to elect one?




Imperfect Character is Universal

The question of why anything exists rather than nothing was a question that Plotinus considered in The Enneads. Why would The One order anyt...