"On Sunday the protest artist Petr Pavlensky sat naked on Red Square and drove a nail through his scrotum and into the pavement."

"Pavlensky had staged disturbing protests before."

In July of last year, he sewed his mouth shut and stood outside a cathedral in St. Petersburg in a show of solidarity with the jailed art collective Pussy Riot. In May he had himself wrapped, naked, in a cocoon of barbed wire and placed on the steps of the St. Petersburg legislature. He lay immobile while the police hunted for a pair of garden shears, severed the wire and then struggled to avoid being cut themselves. That time Pavlensky was protesting a series of restrictions on freedom of speech and of assembly....

Each of these actions required the police to deal with Pavlensky’s body — something Russian law enforcement officials almost never have to do, even though they routinely mangle, maim and kill protesters, convicts and perceived violators of rules and laws.

"Of all the photos we have, this one is in the poorest condition."

"That's because Grandmother carried the snapshot slipped between the pages of a Russian Orthodox prayer book that jiggled in her pocket as she escaped Russia during the 1917 Revolution."

ADDED: A post about the prayer book:

Why did Tatjana already have a Roman Catholic prayer book when she fled Russia? There's an explanation....

"It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation."

Writes Vladimir Putin... in a NYT op-ed.

There are big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way to democracy. Their policies differ, too. We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal.

What a fine time Putin is having, repurposing American pieties and slapping our President around!

That's the very end of the op-ed, and here's a line from the top of the column: "But we were also allies once, and defeated the Nazis together." Putin is sly enough not to be explicit, but the inference is there: Remember when the Nazis encouraged the Germans to see themselves as exceptional?

Poor Obama! Righties have been pummeling him for years for failing to manifest a belief in American exceptionalism. He throws them a sop and Putin hits him over the head.

"They think they know where the targets are, they think they know how to hit it with enough force but not too much force, they think they know how the Russian and the Iranians will react."

"We cannot determine all this. On some level, we’re assuming the reaction from Russia and Iraq and Syria will be zero: We’ll carry out this attacks, and there’ll be no response. This is a bit of a sensitive subject, but the administration has been honest that they have no smoking gun that the attack was ordered by Assad. The evidence of his involvement is circumstantial. We’re two years into a civil war that he’s winning. The Russians and Iranians have told him not to use chemical weapons. Hezbollah has told him not to use chemical weapons because their fighters are at risk. So he’s winning, there’s scant and circumstantial evidence that he ordered the attack. Why are we gaming out his incentives when we don’t know he ordered it?"

Says Alan Grayson, a Democratic congressman from Florida, in an interview with Ezra Klein (who's been doing some excellent interviews lately).

"U.S.-Russian Ties Still Fall Short of 'Reset' Goal."

NYT headline that seems like it must have been written as a joke and left on unintentionally, in the "Mush From the Wimp" tradition.

From the text of the article, there's a fascinating revelation:

Just days before Vladimir V. Putin reassumed the presidency of Russia last year, President Obama dispatched his national security adviser to Moscow... [Putin] opened the meeting with...:

“When... are you going to start bombing Syria?”

"If a person does not put across his views in the presence of children, no measures against him can be taken..."

"People of nontraditional sexual orientations can take part in the competitions and all other events at the [Olympic] Games unhindered, without any fear for their safety whatsoever."

When Phillippe Reines — the man behind Hillary's "reset" button — said "fuck off" and "have a good life" to Michael Hastings — the reporter who died recently in a mysterious car crash.

In the comments to the "Snowden is like a hot meat pie in your hands" post — about what leaker Edward Snowden means to the Russians — David said "So much for reset. Apparently Obama and Clinton have not improved relations [with Russia] much." Which got me looking up articles about Hillary Clinton's foolish "reset" button. I found "Hillary’s Aide Really Half-Assed That ‘Reset’ Button Thing" from March 2009:

[F]ingers had to be pointed at someone, and, for the most part they were conveniently targeted at a guy everyone hated already anyway, Hillary's senior adviser Phillippe Reines, who was nearly fired during the presidential campaign for making a tactless comment about John McCain's torture experience. He's also been agitating some in the State Department press corps by restricting their access.

(I think the referenced comment about McCain is here.) Now, we talked about Reines last fall in connection with this story: "Hillary Clinton Aide Tells Reporter To 'Fuck Off' And 'Have A Good Life.'" And I'm surprised to see that the reporter is Michael Hastings, who died in a fiery single-car wreck on June 18th:

He had emailed a warning to colleagues on June 17 saying the "Feds" were interviewing his close friends and associates. He added: "I'm onto a big story, and need to go off the radat (sic) for a bit." BuzzFeed editor Ben Smith confirmed that he had received the email....

The circumstances and rumors surrounding the death led the FBI to issue a statement stating that Hastings was never under investigation.

In this light, you might want to read that Phillipe Reines/Michael Hastings email exchange again. Hastings was asking questions like "Why didn’t the State Department search the [Benghazi] consulate...?" and "What other potential valuable intelligence [besides Ambassador Stevens's diary] was left behind that could have been picked up by apparently anyone searching the grounds?" Reines became extremely defensive and abusive:

I now understand why the official investigation by the Department of the Defense as reported by The Army Times The Washington Post concluded beyond a doubt that you’re an unmitigated asshole.

How’s that for a non-bullshit response?

Now that we’ve gotten that out of our systems, have a good day.

And by good day, I mean Fuck Off.

ADDED: From 4 days ago: "Was Michael Hastings Murdered? Internet Conspiracy Theories Are Rife."

First, it's obvious that Hastings was working on a big story, though the exact subject is under debate. Considering the title of his email ["FBI Investigation, re:NSA"] and his last article on BuzzFeed, many (including the Guardian's Glenn Greenwald) think it may have been a piece on PRISM. The Huffington Post thinks he was writing about General Petraeus, while the Los Angeles Times stated that it was on a privacy lawsuit against the Department of Defense and the FBI. They are all big, government-related cases that many would prefer go unexamined.

Second, Hastings reached out to the legal team at Wikileaks for assistance, claiming that that FBI were investigating him. Wikileaks has also claimed that there is a "non-public complication" in Hastings' death, though they have not released more information.

Third, while is it ordinary protocol for police departments to issue a statement that there was no foul play (as the LAPD have done), the FBI hardly ever responds to media attention. However, in this case, they have made an exception. The FBI has released a statement denying that they were ever investigating Hastings, which is interesting considering that after years in his field, Hastings is well aware of what being investigated by the FBI looks like.

Fourth, the car accident itself was pretty bizarre. When the car hit the tree, the engine ejected and was later found over 100 feet away. That kind of ejection is pretty unusual, especially for a Mercedes, and it also meant that Hastings would have had to be driving close to 100 mph, which is much faster than that section of road permits.....

"Snowden is like a hot meat pie in your hands..."

"... even if you want to eat it very much, it’s very hot and maybe it’s better to throw it on the floor," said Igor M. Bunin, the director of the Center for Political Technologies in Moscow.

"To make a deal with America to turn Snowden over would be a slap in the face of public opinion because he is already a hero in Russia and part of the West. On the other hand, not turning him over destroys your relationship with America."

From a NYT article titled, "While N.S.A. Leaker Stays in Hiding, Russian TV Builds a Pedestal for Him." Excerpt:

“The Internet is an invention of the U.S. Ministry of Defense,” [said the pro-Kremlin analyst Vyacheslav A. Nikonov]. “Where is the Internet? Physically, it is in the United States. What is the Internet? It’s an American nongovernmental organization which is, of course, connected with the intelligence services of the United States.”...

“For Americans, human rights is a powerful tool for influencing other countries,” [said Aleksandr Prokhanov, a nationalist ideologue who has emerged as a leader in conservative thought]. “A country ‘violates human rights,’ and its president becomes a devil incarnate, the society destabilizes, the human rights issue is followed by attack planes, and the country is wiped out from the face of the earth.”

Russia and The Stoned Fox.

"When British artist Adele Morse put her stuffed fox up for sale on eBay, she was surprised to get fan mail from Russia.... Unbeknown to Ms. Morse, her fox — sitting cross-legged, with a vacant stare on its face — had become an Internet sensation here...."

Article in the WSJ. Video:

60 years ago today, the Rosenbergs were executed.

Here's the NYT article that appeared on the 50th anniversary of the execution.

The available evidence now suggests to historians that Julius Rosenberg did in fact spy for the Soviet Union. The evidence against Ethel Rosenberg, however, is considered flimsy at best. But whatever they may have done, it is far from evident that they had handed Moscow the key to its first atomic bomb, as charged at the time.

The couple remain a special case. The United States has had many spies over the last 50 years, including some believed to have done great harm to American interests. Not one was put to death.

Here's the Wikipedia page:

The Rosenbergs were the only two American civilians to be executed for espionage-related activity during the Cold War. In imposing the death penalty, [Judge Irving] Kaufman noted that he held them responsible not only for espionage but also for the deaths of the Korean War:

“I consider your crime worse than murder...
I believe your conduct in putting into the hands of the Russians the A-Bomb years before our best scientists predicted Russia would perfect the bomb has already caused, in my opinion, the Communist aggression in Korea, with the resultant casualties exceeding 50,000 and who knows but that millions more of innocent people may pay the price of your treason. Indeed, by your betrayal you undoubtedly have altered the course of history to the disadvantage of our country. No one can say that we do not live in a constant state of tension. We have evidence of your treachery all around us every day for the civilian defense activities throughout the nation are aimed at preparing us for an atom bomb attack.”

Commenting on the sentence given to them, Julius Rosenberg claimed the case is a political frame-up.

“This death sentence is not surprising. It had to be. There had to be a Rosenberg case, because there had to be an intensification of the hysteria in America to make the Korean War acceptable to the American people. There had to be hysteria and a fear sent through America in order to get increased war budgets. And there had to be a dagger thrust in the heart of the left to tell them that you are no longer gonna get five years for a Smith Act prosecution or one year for contempt of court, but we’re gonna kill ya! ”...

Marxist Nobel Prize-winning existentialist philosopher and writer Jean-Paul Sartre called the trial "a legal lynching which smears with blood a whole nation. By killing the Rosenbergs, you have quite simply tried to halt the progress of science by human sacrifice. Magic, witch-hunts, autos-da-fé, sacrifices – we are here getting to the point: your country is sick with fear ... you are afraid of the shadow of your own bomb." Others, including non-Communists such as Jean Cocteau, Albert Einstein and Nobel-Prize-winning physical chemist Harold Urey, as well as Communists or left-leaning artists such as Nelson Algren, Bertolt Brecht, Dashiell Hammett, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, protested the position of the American government in what the French termed America's Dreyfus affair. In May 1951, Pablo Picasso wrote for the communist French newspaper L’Humanité, "The hours count. The minutes count. Do not let this crime against humanity take place." The all-black labor union International Longshoremen’s Association Local 968 stopped working for a day in protest. Cinema artists such as Fritz Lang registered their protest. Pope Pius XII appealed to President Dwight D. Eisenhower to spare the couple, but Eisenhower refused on February 11, 1953, and all other appeals were also unsuccessful.

Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, vice-chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, investigated how much the Soviet spy ring helped the USSR to build their bomb. In 1945, Moynihan found, physicist Hans Bethe estimated that the Soviets would be able to build their own bomb in five years. “Thanks to information provided by their agents,” Moynihan concluded in his book Secrecy, they did it in four. That was the edge that espionage gave them: one year.”

Drudge at his best: "Wanna Come to Russia?"

That links to a Guardian story with the far less ominous heading: "Edward Snowden: Russia offers to consider asylum request/Vladimir Putin's spokesman says any appeal for asylum from whistleblower who fled US will be looked at 'according to facts.'"

Drudge's attitude is shown by other links at the top right now.

Above Putin's image: "Democrats Love Gov't Surveillance -- As Long As It's Obama, Not Bush..." (which is about the same WaPo-Pew poll that we're talking about here).

At the top of the left-hand column is: "Plan B: In latenight announcement, Obama allows morning-after abortion pill for under-17s..." (which makes it look like Obama is trying to woo us over into women's issues), "UPDATE: Soldier Who Read Conservative Books Faces Charges..." (more political bias in the exercise of power), and "US Ambassador to Belgium 'Solicited Prostitutes, Including Minors': State Dept IG..." (the new scandal).

The middle column begins with 3 headlines about terrorism in airports, and then another story about  political bias in the exercise of power: "Audio: IRS agent tells pro-life group: 'Keep your faith to yourself'..."

The right-hand column is devoted to the NSA story, pairing a Republican — "Boehner: NSA Leaker a 'Traitor'..." — with a Democrat — "AL FRANKEN: 'There Are Certain Things Appropriate For Me To Know That Is Not Appropriate For Bad Guys To Know'..."

"According to Snezhnevsky, patients with sluggish schizophrenia could present as seemingly sane..."

"... but manifest minimal (and clinically relevant) personality changes which could remain unnoticed by the untrained eye."

Patients with non-psychotic mental disorders (or who were not mentally ill) could be diagnosed with sluggish schizophrenia. Along with paranoia, sluggish schizophrenia was the diagnosis most frequently used for the psychiatric incarceration of dissenters....

The incidence of sluggish schizophrenia increased because, according to Snezhnevsky and his colleagues, patients with this diagnosis were capable of socially functioning almost normally.

Ironically, reading about "sluggish schizophrenia" may cause you to manifest the very symptoms you are reading about.

Why am I reading about it this morning? I clicked on a link in the Wikipedia article "Political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union," which was something I linked to in my previous post in this sentence: "There's something very creepy about government portraying political beliefs in terms of mental health."

They said "they were the Boston Marathon bombers and would not kill him because he wasn't American."

Says the driver of the hijacked SUV.

The clear inference is that Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev were motivated by a specific hatred of Americans... in case you'd been led to think that the Chechen dispute is with Russia.

"Most Russian oligarchs tend to end up acquiescing to the Kremlin, or else are killed, jailed, or exiled into oblivion."

 "But Mr. Berezovsky’s life simply unraveled."

"Bolshoi ballet was 'giant brothel' claims former dancer."

"Anastasia Volochkova... fired from the Bolshoi in 2003 for being too heavy... made the allegations...."

"Ten years ago, when I was dancing at the theatre, I repeatedly received such propositions to share the beds of oligarchs.

"The girls were forced to go along to grand dinners and given advance warning that afterwards they would be expected to go to bed and have sex," she alleged.

"When the girls asked: 'What happens if we refuse?', they were told that they would not go on tour or even perform at the Bolshoi theatre. Can you imagine?"

"Star Bolshoi dancer Pavel Dmitrichenko admits acid attack."

"'I organized this attack,' Dmitrichenko, with dark circles under his eyes and looking slightly disheveled...

Before [the victim Sergei] Filin became the Bolshoi artistic director two years ago, responsible for choosing who danced what part and charting the direction of the company, he was ballet director at the smaller Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Musical Theater.

There, he tried to hire a young ballerina named Anzhelina Vorontsova, who turned him down to dance at the Bolshoi. Her teacher and mentor at the Bolshoi was Nikolai Tsiskaridze, a dancer who reportedly wanted the Bolshoi job given to Filin and has been an outspoken critic of Bolshoi management.

When Filin joined the Bolshoi, he did not promote Vorontsova, according to the television report. In another twist, Dmitrichenko, who was known for his volatile temperament, was reportedly romantically involved with Vorontsova....

Now that we're talking about the 1927 silent film "King of Kings," we must take note of Ayn Rand.

We were talking about "King of Kings," because we were talking about what Jesus wrote in the sand, because various blogs were talking about an Islamist Facebook page with a cartoon showing how to carry out a stoning. I started to wonder whether the first commenter who mentioned "King of Kings" was talking about the 1927 Cecil B. DeMille picture or the 1961 Nicholas Ray flick. So I'm over here on the King of Kings (1927 film) page at Wikipedia, and I see:

Sally Rand, before becoming notorious for her "fan dance" at the 1933 World's Fair, was an extra in the film.

Ayn Rand (no relation to Sally Rand) also was an extra in the film, and met her future husband Frank O'Connor on set.

I couldn't find a YouTube clip of Ayn Rand in "King of Kings," but I did find Sally Rand and her notorious World's Fair fan dance:



I also found this 2009 New Yorker article about Ayn Rand that covers the "King of Kings" phase:

Rand... left the U.S.S.R. for America.... Her vision of the U.S. had already been shaped by obsessive moviegoing.... Even before leaving the Soviet Union, she had published a pamphlet on the silent-film actress Pola Negri, and like a movie star herself she now refashioned “Rosenbaum” into her own new name. Heller and Burns both knock down the myth that a Remington-Rand typewriter inspired the rechristening.

There is a greater factual basis to the legend of Rand’s having met Cecil B. DeMille before she worked as an extra on his production of “The King of Kings” (1927). On the set, Rand persuaded a costume director to promote her from a crowd of beggars to a crowd of patricians, and DeMille had his story chief look at her film scenarios, which were soon judged over the top. Rand achieved steadier success working in the R.K.O. wardrobe department, and then had a writerly breakthrough with a courtroom murder drama called “Night of January 16th.” Thanks to a gimmick that allowed each night’s audience to serve as the jury and thereby choose the ending, the play made it to Broadway, where Rand railed against the producers’ subordination of its incidental messages about the beauty of unbridled individualism.

Settling in New York with her husband, Frank O’Connor (another “King of Kings” extra), Rand set seriously to work on the first of her two major novels, “The Fountainhead.”....

How do you feel about all those connections? The Soviet Union, the love of movies, immigration to the land of movies, name-changing, finding the love of your life on a movie set in Hollywood, strippers performing what is only the illusion of nakedness, and... Jesus.

"Have you ever eaten bread?"/"I have. But they have not. They have never seen it."

"At least he was intelligible. The daughters spoke a language distorted by a lifetime of isolation. 'When the sisters talked to each other, it sounded like a slow, blurred cooing.'"

The old man's name was Karp Lykov, and he was an Old Believer—a member of a fundamentalist Russian Orthodox sect, worshiping in a style unchanged since the 17th century....

[In 1936] Karp; his wife, Akulina; a son named Savin, 9 years old, and Natalia, a daughter who was only 2... had retreated ever deeper into the taiga, building themselves a succession of crude dwelling places, until at last they had fetched up in this desolate spot. Two more children had been born in the wild—Dmitry in 1940 and Agafia in 1943—and neither of the youngest Lykov children had ever seen a human being who was not a member of their family. All that Agafia and Dmitry knew of the outside world they learned entirely from their parents' stories.....

The Lykov children knew there were places called cities where humans lived crammed together in tall buildings. They had heard there were countries other than Russia. But such concepts were no more than abstractions to them.

Video here. 

"One hopes Mr. Obama wouldn't be so eager to come to Mr. Putin's rescue."

"If the rumors are a Kremlin hoax, the U.S. should publicly shoot them down as quickly as possible. To allow them to spread would be a display of weakness — the kind that a bully like Mr. Putin is always eager to exploit. Back in 1961, the perceived weakness of young President John F. Kennedy at his Vienna summit with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev led indirectly to the Cuban missile crisis. Only when Kennedy showed resolve did the Soviets later back down."

Writes Garry Kasparov in the WSJ.

Joseph Brodsky "used to appall his students by requiring them to memorize something like a thousand lines each semester."

"He felt he was preparing them for the future; they might need such verses later in life. His own biography provided a stirring example of the virtues of mental husbandry. He’d been grateful for every scrap of poetry he had in his head during his enforced exile in the Arctic, banished there by a Soviet government that did not know what to do with his genius and that, in a symbolic embrace of a national policy of brain drain, expelled him from the country in 1972."

From "Why We Should Memorize," by Brad Leithauser.

(In 1972, Brodsky became the poet in residence at the University of Michigan. I was a student there at the time and remember a grand assembly with Brodsky received as a great hero.)