Depopulating Russia Could Get Angry

Russia’s Future - Grumpy Petro-Giant Armed-to-the-Teeth with Social Unrest

By Michael Lee

Although Russia’s population has peaked and is now decreasing, this resource-rich Eurasian giant will not go gently into the good night of decline.

Nor will the rich tapestry of Russian history, populated with larger-than-life autocrats such as Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Lenin, Stalin and Putin, and defined by world-shaking events like the Russian Revolution, the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, become uneventful in the 21st century.

While Russian society will age and shrink throughout this century, it will at the same time rise to become an energy superpower. Situated at the crossroads of the world between the shifting geo-political landscapes of Eurasia, I expect a restless, cat-and-mouse Russian foreign policy for the future while the nation manages its growing geopolitical influence as a restored global power spanning an enormous landmass across Europe and Asia.

“With its natural gas and oil pipelines that tie Europe to Russia like an umbilical cord, Russia has unchecked power and influence that in a real sense exceed the military power and influence it had in the Cold War… Russia is in a stronger position relative to Western Europe than it has ever been in its history.” - Marshall I.Goldman, author of Petrostate: Putin, Power and the New Russia

Europe’s New Fascists

Europe must face old ghosts once more

By WILLIAM WHEELER

ONE evening in September 2011, Ali Rahimi, a 27-year-old Afghan asylum seeker, was hanging around with friends outside his building in central Athens when more than a dozen Greeks approached. Several men set upon Mr. Rahimi, one with a knife. Panicked, he fled into his apartment and fought back, managing to push the men out the door. He found blood gushing from just above his heart, one of five stab wounds in his back and chest.

Mr. Rahimi survived and is staying put for now. But his friend, Reza Mohammed, who was also injured in the attack, is considering what was once unthinkable: moving back to Afghanistan, which he feels would be safer than Greece.

Greece is the major entry point for Asian and African migrants and asylum seekers headed into Europe; there are about one million of them in the country today, thanks to the failure of successive Greek governments to establish a functioning migration or asylum policy, and a European Union regulation that allows member states to return asylum seekers to the country where they first entered Europe, which is often Greece.

Parts of Athens feel like a war zone. Racist gangs cruise the streets at night in search of victims. Themis Skordeli, a member of the group that is accused of stabbing Mr. Rahimi, ran unsuccessfully for Parliament on the ticket of Golden Dawn, a fascist group that is currently the third most popular party in Greece.

Golden Dawn was founded in 1985 under the order of the imprisoned leader of the Greek junta. The party entered the international spotlight after some of its members reportedly participated in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of Bosnian Muslims. Its publication praises the Third Reich and often features photographs of Hitler and other Nazis.

Understanding the "Exorbitant Privilege" of the U.S. Dollar

Scarcity and demand

The dollar rises for the same reason gold and grain rise

by Charles Hugh Smith

Which is easier to export: manufactured goods that require shipping ore and oil halfway around the world, smelting the ore into steel and turning the oil into plastics, laboriously fabricating real products and then shipping the finished manufactured goods to the U.S. where fierce pricing competition strips away much of the premium/profit?

Or electronically printing money and exchanging it for real products, steel, oil, etc.?

I think we can safely say that creating money out of thin air and "exporting" that is much easier than actually mining, extracting or manufacturing real goods. This astonishing exchange of conjured money for real goods is the heart of the "exorbitant privilege" that accrues to the issuer of the global reserve currency (U.S. dollar).

To understand the reserve currency, we must understand Triffin's Paradox, a topic I discussed in What Will Benefit from Global Recession? The U.S. Dollar (October 9, 2012) and Is There Any Correlation Between the U.S. Dollar and Gold (Or Anything Else?)
(November 14, 2012).

It seems very few grasp the implications of the Paradox, and even fewer relate it to global trade. I recently discussed Triffin's Paradox and The Rule of Law in a video program with Gordon T. Long, who noted that the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) described the conditions in which Triffin's Paradox becomes unsustainable:

"To supply the world's risk-free asset, the center country must run a current account deficit and in doing so become ever more indebted to foreigners, until the risk-free asset that it issues ceases to be risk-free. Precisely because the world is happy to have a dependable asset to hold as a store of value, it will buy so much of that asset that its issuer will become unsustainably burdened."

Goat Economics

Why the Laffer Curve Is No Joke

By Charlie Musick

Goat herding is one of the world's oldest economic professions.  It is because goats are excellent at reproduction, and easy to feed and raise. A female goat will on average birth around 2 kids per year. Simple math would suggest that if you start with 2 goats, you can double your herd each year. Thus in 10 years you will be quite wealthy with over 1000 goats (2^10 = 1024).

But as one can imagine, it turns out that goat herding is a little more complicated than that. First, the normal life expectancy of a goat is around 10 years.  This means you will lose about 10% of a herd to old age annually. Additionally, while goats may birth two kids per year, the viability rate is around 75% such that each female will only net an average of 1.5. Still, if you do the calculations, starting with 10 female goats you will have around 1496 female goats after 10 years.

Since raising goats is a rather simple economic activity, it is easy to model the impact of taxation on goat farming. Assuming the government comes and takes various numbers of the new goats (income) each year in goat taxes, one can easily calculate the impact of the size of the herd, and ultimately how much total revenue the government would receive over 10 years at various tax rates. It turns out that the optimum tax rate is in the 20-30% range to maximize total 10 year revenue.

Few things about health care in US

Inconvenient Truths 

By Scott Atlas

Like the Olympic tribute to Britain’s NHS, countries wear nationalized health systems as badges of pride.  In those same countries, assertions like “fifty million Americans have no access to care” and “US health care is scandalous” are widespread. Despite their frequency, these denunciations are wholly contradicted by facts.

No charge is repeated more often than this statistic: 16%, almost 50 million Americans, lack health insurance. But ten million were not even US citizens; millions more claimed to have no health insurance but were using insurance; and 13 million adults and 5 million children were already eligible for government insurance, but had not enrolled. Claims about uninsured Americans have been greatly exaggerated.

The truth is that health insurance does not equate with health care access. Statistics Canada stated “waiting time has been identified as a key measure of access.” Affirming 2005’s Chaoulli v. Quebec, in which Supreme Court justices famously concluded “access to a waiting list is not access to health care,” countless studies document grave consequences from prolonged waits. A growing list of European countries, including Denmark, England, Finland, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, and Sweden, have been forced by public outcry and laws to address unacceptable waits for care.

Meanwhile, it is understood that “waiting lists are not a feature in the United States,” as stated in a 2007 study and separately underscored by the OECD (“[the US is] a country where waiting time is not a policy concern”).  Indeed, Americans would be stunned to hear the reality of nationalized insurance:

• In its latest “care guarantee,” Sweden found it necessary to stipulate that patients must be able to see a doctor within seven days; patients should not wait more than 90 days to see a specialist; and treatment should be scheduled within 90 days…six months from presentation;

Putin and Merkel Tango in Moscow

Gazprom Stirs Up Old Ghosts, But Deals Are Signed

By Wolf Richter   

Last week, the German Parliament passed a resolution that asked Chancellor Angela Merkel to needle Russian President Vladimir Putin about the resurgence of repressive, antidemocratic tendencies in Russia. It did not go unnoticed at the Kremlin. And it paved the way, so to speak, for her trip to Moscow on Friday—to re-cement their “strategic partnership.”

Complaints about the resolution filtered back to the point where Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle, just before departing for Moscow, warned his countrymen not to overdo their criticism of Russia. It’s in the interests of Germany, he mused, to expand the “strategic partnership”; Russia was needed as a geopolitical and economic partner.

Indeed. Merkel arrived in Moscow with her entourage that included eight ministers and corporate chieftains by the planeload—she doesn’t leave home without them. With Merkel and Putin looking on, these chieftains and their Russian counterparts signed contracts for billions of euros, a ritual that German chancellors have to perform when abroad. It’s part of Germany’s mercantilist foreign policy. Siemens CEO Peter Löscher bagged perhaps the biggest deal, a declaration of intent to deliver 695 electric locomotives for €2.5 billion ($3.2 billion) to Russian Railways (RZD), an elephantine state-owned company with 950,000 employees.

That’s what really mattered. Criticism of Russia—carefully calibrated and range-bound—would be for consumption at home, where anti-Russian sentiment has been rising. With elections coming up next year, Merkel, the consummate political animal, is treading a fine line: deliver a bland rebuke that would barely satisfy voters in Germany and help arrange deals that would fully satisfy German industry.

The Central Bankers Potemkin Village

War is Inevitable and the Sheep will be lead to Slaughter

Below are some of the key highlights from Kyle Bass' latest, and as usual, must read letter:

On central banks and the final round of global monetary debasement:

Central bankers are feverishly attempting to create their own new world: a utopia in which debts are never restructured, and there are no consequences for fiscal profligacy, i.e. no atonement for prior sins. They have created Potemkin villages on a Jurassic scale. The sum total of the volatility they are attempting to suppress will be less than the eventual volatility encountered when their schemes stop working. Most refer to comments like this as heresy against the orthodoxy of economic thought. We have a hard time understanding how the current situation ends any way other than a massive loss of wealth and purchasing power through default, inflation or both.

In the Keynesian bible (The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money), there is a very interesting tidbit of Keynes’ conscience in the last chapter titled “Concluding Notes” from page 376:

[I]t would mean the euthanasia of the rentier, and, consequently, the euthanasia of the cumulative oppressive power of the capitalist to exploit the scarcity value of capital. Interest today rewards no genuine sacrifice, any more than does the rent of land. The owner of capital can obtain interest because capital is scarce, just as the owner of land can obtain rent because land is scarce. But whilst there may be intrinsic reasons for the scarcity of land, there are no intrinsic reasons for the scarcity of capital.

. . .

Thus we might aim in practice (there being nothing in this which is unattainable) at an increase in capital until it ceases to be scarce, so that the functionless investor will no longer receive a bonus[.] (emphasis added)

This is nothing more than a chilling prescription for the destruction of wealth through the dilution of capital by monetary authorities.

Central banks have become the great enablers of fiscal profligacy. They have removed the proverbial policemen from the bond market highway. If central banks purchase the entirety of incremental bond issuance used to finance fiscal deficits, the checks and balances of “normal” market interest rates are obscured or even eliminated altogether. This market phenomenon does nothing to encourage the body politic to take their foot off the spending accelerator. It is both our primary fear and unfortunately our prediction that this quixotic path of spending and printing will continue ad-infinitum until real cost-push inflation manifests itself. We won’t get into the MV=PQ argument here as the reality of the situation is the fact that the V is the “solve-for” variable, which is at best a concurrent or lagging indicator. Given the enormity of the existing government debt stock, it will not be possible to control the very inflation that the market is currently hoping for. As each 100 basis points in cost of capital costs the US federal government over $150 billion, the US simply cannot afford for another Paul Volcker to raise rates and contain inflation once it begins.

Global warming stopped 16 years ago, reveals last Met Office report

So what ?

By David Rose

The world stopped getting warmer almost 16 years ago, according to new data released last week. 

The figures, which have triggered debate among climate scientists, reveal that from the beginning of 1997 until August 2012, there was no discernible rise in aggregate global temperatures.

This means that the ‘plateau’ or ‘pause’ in global warming has now lasted for about the same time as the previous period when temperatures rose, 1980 to 1996. Before that, temperatures had been stable or declining for about 40 years. 

The new data, compiled from more than 3,000 measuring points on land and sea, was issued  quietly on the internet, without any media fanfare, and, until today, it has not been reported. 

This stands in sharp contrast  to the release of the previous  figures six months ago, which went only to the end of 2010 – a very warm year. 

Ending the data then means it is possible to show a slight warming trend since 1997, but 2011 and the first eight months of 2012 were much cooler, and thus this trend is erased. 

Some climate scientists, such as Professor Phil Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, last week dismissed the significance of the plateau, saying that 15 or 16 years is too short a period from which to draw conclusions.

Others disagreed. Professor Judith Curry, who is the head of the climate science department at America’s prestigious Georgia Tech university, told The Mail on Sunday that it was clear that the computer models used to predict future warming were ‘deeply flawed’. 

End Game in Middle East

Update on the Israel-Gaza Conflict

By Stratfor

Summary

New intelligence indicates forces in Gaza may be manufacturing long-range rockets locally. If this is the case, a significant ground force offers the Israelis the best chance of finding and neutralizing the factories making these weapons. Meanwhile, Israel continues its airstrikes on Gaza, and Gaza continues its long-range rocket attacks on major Israeli population centers, though Israel claims its Iron Dome defense system has intercepted most of the rockets.

Analysis

Israel appears to be positioning itself for a ground operation, perhaps as early as the night of Nov. 17. The Israeli Cabinet on Nov. 16 approved Defense Minister Ehud Barak's request to call up 75,000 reservists, significantly more than during Operation Cast Lead in 2008-2009. The Israeli army meanwhile has also sought to strengthen its presence on the borders with Gaza. Primary roads leading to Gaza and running parallel to Sinai have been declared closed military zones. Tanks, armored personnel carriers, self-propelled artillery and troops continue to stream to the border, and many units already appear to be in position.

Silent Partners

How Israel Helped to Spawn Hamas

By ANDREW HIGGINS

Surveying the wreckage of a neighbor's bungalow hit by a Palestinian rocket, retired Israeli official Avner Cohen traces the missile's trajectory back to an "enormous, stupid mistake" made 30 years ago.

"Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel's creation," says Mr. Cohen, a Tunisian-born Jew who worked in Gaza for more than two decades. Responsible for religious affairs in the region until 1994, Mr. Cohen watched the Islamist movement take shape, muscle aside secular Palestinian rivals and then morph into what is today Hamas, a militant group that is sworn to Israel's destruction.

Instead of trying to curb Gaza's Islamists from the outset, says Mr. Cohen, Israel for years tolerated and, in some cases, encouraged them as a counterweight to the secular nationalists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and its dominant faction, Yasser Arafat's Fatah. Israel cooperated with a crippled, half-blind cleric named Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, even as he was laying the foundations for what would become Hamas. Sheikh Yassin continues to inspire militants today; during the recent war in Gaza, Hamas fighters confronted Israeli troops with "Yassins," primitive rocket-propelled grenades named in honor of the cleric.

Last Saturday, after 22 days of war, Israel announced a halt to the offensive. The assault was aimed at stopping Hamas rockets from falling on Israel. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert hailed a "determined and successful military operation." More than 1,200 Palestinians had died. Thirteen Israelis were also killed.

Restoring American Prosperity

Limiting Leviathan

by Brian Domitrovic

What a gift to civilization this United States of America is. If you had to count the ways, how many very big things there are in which this country has positively excelled over its over two centuries of history.

There is of course the political order watched over by our Constitution. Popular government remaining limited and respectful of rights would be a pipe dream the world over without the example of this country.

There is also the incredible tradition of social peace in a country of tens and now hundreds of millions of persons. Americans are now marking the 150th anniversary of the civil war that rent this country so badly in the 1860s. Since that time, this country has seen essentially no political violence of note, and in particular in an era—the 20th century—in which political violence and revolutionism took tens of millions of lives worldwide. 

Then there is the moral maturity this country has shown over the years, evidenced in particular by its unsurpassed tradition of philanthropy. Do you remember a few years ago, when the tsunami hit in Indonesia, and word went out over the media that the relief effort which succored several million in the aftermath of that disaster represented the largest act of relief in world history? This was actually wrong. That honor still belongs to the American-led response to the Communist-induced Russian famine of 1921, when 20 million were saved from starvation. American giving, so much of it private, has been so profuse, effective, and unselfish that we are apt to forget its major examples.All of these stunning traits, our political order, social conviviality, and moral goodness, make up, collectively, what we are wont to call “American exceptionalism”—that glorious tendency in our country, shown so many times over its history, to be true to being a good and just society.

But for all these things, there is still one other that might be the most incredible and persistent trait of American exceptionalism of them all. This is our mind-boggling tradition of economic growth and prosperity.

Do you know how much the economy of the United States grew in the one and a quarter century since the Constitution was ratified, in 1789, until the fateful year of 1913, when this country established the Federal Reserve and the income tax? 1789-1913? The number is 150-fold. The economy was 150 times larger in 1913 than it was in 1789.

The Nearly-Free University

The Nearly-Free University model would revolutionize higher education

by Charles Hugh-Smith

The key to understanding higher education in the U.S. is to grasp that it is at heart just another debt-dependent neofeudal cartel. In other words, it is just like sickcare and the national defense complex.

Each cartel shares these features:

1. Compelling PR "cover" for cartel extraction of wealth. "Healthcare" (i.e. sickcare that profits from illness, not health) is a "right." The defense industry is the bulwark of democracy, and "educating our children" is the key to future prosperity. Each portrays itself as sacrosanct.

These "Mom and apple pie" cover stories enable monopolistic exploitation: $300 million a piece fighter aircraft (replacing $54 million aircraft), $150,000 college diplomas, and "healthcare" spending that is two times more per capita than competing advanced democracies.

Ron Paul Addressed His Countrymen, Adult to Adult

Productivity and creativity are the true source of personal satisfaction

By Maura Pennington

Say what you will about Ron Paul as a political operator or orator, he offered more uplifting words on the House floor yesterday than many of our current statesmen can muster.  They weren’t sweeping remarks, at least not the kind that sweep people off their feet and into a swirling, senseless mob.  Unlike President Obama’s victory speech last week, Paul didn’t refer to the masses as “an American family” in need of a parent.  Instead, he addressed his countrymen as peers capable of understanding the role of government.  To that end, he rebuked his colleagues in Washington:

“Politicians deceive themselves as to how wealth is produced.  Excessive confidence is placed in the judgment of politicians and bureaucrats.  This replaces the confidence in a free society.”

Tribal America

On our suddenly race-obsessed politics

By Mark Steyn

To an immigrant such as myself (not the undocumented kind, but documented up to the hilt, alas), one of the most striking features of election-night analysis was the lightly worn racial obsession. On Fox News, Democrat Kirsten Powers argued that Republicans needed to deal with the reality that America is becoming what she called a “brown country.” Her fellow Democrat Bob Beckel observed on several occasions that if the share of the “white vote” was held down below 73 percent Romney would lose. In the end, it was 72 percent and he did. Beckel’s assertion — that if you knew the ethnic composition of the electorate you also knew the result — turned out to be correct.

This is what less enlightened societies call tribalism: For example, in the 1980 election leading to Zimbabwe’s independence, Joshua Nkomo’s ZAPU-PF got the votes of the Ndebele people while Robert Mugabe’s ZANU-PF secured those of the Shona — and, as there were more Shona than Ndebele, Mugabe won. That same year America held an election, and Ronald Reagan won a landslide victory. Nobody talked about tribal-vote shares back then, but had the percentage of what Beckel calls the “white vote” been the same in 2012 as it was in 1980 (88 percent), Mitt Romney would have won in an even bigger landslide than Reagan. The “white vote” will be even lower in 2016, and so, on the Beckel model, Republicans are set to lose all over again.

War In Gaza: Why Now?

Election Politics?

by George Washington

It was widely reported that Israel agreed to delay any war against Iran until after U.S. elections.

A little over a week after the election, Israel launched a "targeted assassination" against the leader of Hamas (who Haaretz called Israel's subcontractor in Gaza). That is what started the current round of fighting. Rabbi Arthur Waskow agrees that Israel started the fighting.

Professor Michel Chossudovsky notes:

On November 14,  Hamas military commander Ahmed Jabari was murdered in a Israeli missile attack. In a bitter irony,  barely a few hours before the attack, Hamas received  the draft proposal of a permanent truce agreement with Israel.

“Hours before Hamas strongman Ahmed Jabari was assassinated, he received the draft of a permanent truce agreement with Israel, which included mechanisms for maintaining the cease-fire in the case of a flare-up between Israel and the factions in the Gaza Strip.”(Haaretz, November 15, 2012)

The targeted assassination  of  Ahmed Jabari was followed by an extensive bombing campaign under Operation Pillar of Cloud.  The latter consists of a carefully planned military endeavor.

F-16 fighter planes, Apache helicopters and unmanned drones were deployed. Israeli naval forces deployed along the Gaza shoreline were  involved in extensive shelling of civilian targets.

Israel’s defense minister Ehud Barack has confirmed a scenario of military escalation, blaming Palestine for having committed acts of aggression: .

“[t]he provocations we have suffered and the firing of rockets to the southern settlements within Israel have forced us to take this action. I want to make clear that Israeli citizens will not suffer such actions. The targets are to hit the rockets and to harm the organization of Hamas. 

Anonymous Hacks Greek Finance Ministry, Finds "123456" Is Password For 37% Of All User Accounts

A joke of a country

While we have yet to go through the thousands of files that hacker collective Anonymous has just released as a result of its hack of the Greek Finance Ministry, an exploit it described as follows: "We gained full access to the Greek Ministry of Finance. Those funky IBM servers don't look so safe now, do they... We have new guns in our arsenal. A sweet 0day SAP exploit is in our hands and oh boy we're gonna sploit the hell out of it. Respectz to izl the dog for that perl candy," what we find even more amusing, if not surprising, is that of the 136 username accounts Anonymous hacked, the password of precisely 50 of them, or some 37% of all workers, is.... 123456 (full list here).

That, together with the above archival picture of the inside of the Athens Finance Ministry, explains much more about the current and future state of Greek affairs, than any idiotic Troika/IMF forecast ever could.

As for those curious just what secrets the chaotic finance ministry of the Eurozone's most insolvent country holds, the downloads are available here  and here.

Sifting Through the Wreckage

Yes, Virginia, things changed

By George Weigel

The most inane insta-pundit commentary had it that the 2012 election “hadn’t really changed anything,” what with President Obama still in the White House, the House still in Republican hands, and the Senate still controlled by Democrats. The truth of the matter, of course, is that a great deal changed, somewhere around 11p.m. EST on Tuesday, November 7, when Ohio was declared for the president and the race was effectively over. To wit:

Obamacare, the governmental takeover of one-sixth of the U.S. economy, is now set in legislative concrete, and the progressive campaign to turn ever-larger numbers of citizens into wards of the state has been given a tremendous boost — with electoral consequences as far as the eye can see.

A war in the Middle East is now almost certain, and sooner rather than later; as if the previous three and a half years of fecklessness were not enough, the cast of mind manifest in the administration’s abdication of responsibility in Benghazi will have likely convinced a critical mass of the Israeli leadership that they have no choice but to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities in self-defense. The economic chaos resulting from military conflict in the Persian Gulf (and beyond) will further deepen the European fiscal crisis while making an already weak American economic recovery even more anemic.

The children and grandchildren of November 6’s voters have been condemned to bear the burden of what is certainly an unpayable mountain of debt, and may be an unserviceable amount of debt, which in either case will be an enormous drag on the economy, even as it mortgages America’s strategic options in Asia to the holders of U.S. government bonds in Beijing.

A Country Unhinged

The Party

By Victor Davis Hanson

In the last week, it is almost as if the entire American moral landscape has been turned upside down in eerie fashion — in matters that vastly transcend fornication and adultery. The Petraeus-gate matter is the stuff of tabloids now; but soon the real issues relating to when and what Eric Holder knew, and by extension the president, and how exactly Benghazi (the crime of indifference to the besieged, the cover-up of the truth, the actual mission of our consulate and annex) fits into this labyrinth of deceit, both petty and fundamental, may overshadow the present sensationalism.

Nothing seems real anymore, not preelection federal data on jobs or food stamps or the release of such “facts”; not foreign-policy information like an Iranian attack on a drone; not the supposedly competent federal relief in response to Hurricane Sandy. Even Saddam Hussein’s plebiscites could not achieve margins like the 19,605 to 0 we saw in 59 Philadelphia precincts. Does anyone care?

Stalin’s Sock Puppet

A new play makes Walter Duranty’s journalistic mendacity relevant to our own time

BY STEFAN KANFER

He had two faces, one leg, and no principles. He was a sycophant, a dabbler in the occult, in drugs, in sexual orgies. He was a habitual liar, a serial adulterer, a lout. Of all Generalissimo Joseph Stalin’s useful idiots, he was the most useful, and the most idiotic. And he was one of the most prominent journalists of his time.

Indeed, Walter Duranty not only served as the New York Times’s point man in Moscow, he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1937 for his mendacious reportage. Acting simultaneously as “objective” newspaperman and apologist for the Bolsheviks, he denied the Holodomor, Stalin’s deliberate, deadly starvation of some 12 million Ukrainians, which he knew to be true. In dispatch after dispatch, Duranty acted as Stalin’s sock puppet, labeling eyewitness accounts of mass murder as “malignant propaganda.” Seven decades later, the Pulitzer committee and the Times acknowledged as much. Yet neither institution has seen fit to revoke the award.

This flamboyant self-promoter would make an ideal subject for the stage, and it’s a wonder dramatists have ignored him for so long. Happily, the wait is over. Scenarist Sheryl Longin has collaborated with novelist and polemicist Roger L. Simon to create a compelling two-act play, The Party Line.

Shuttling between the Soviet Union and contemporary Europe, their tragedy focuses on Duranty. But it also includes Sid Brody, a composite of the reporters who started by toeing the Communist Party line and ended by exposing Bolshevik atrocities. Vaulting into the future, it then introduces several memorable characters, including Duranty’s son Michael (a fictitious person, since the journalist’s real son disappeared years ago); Michael’s lover, the soon-to-be-assassinated Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn; and Stockton Rhodes, a credulous CNN correspondent.

Egyptian Idol

The Salafi threat to blow up the pyramids is nothing new

BY IAN STRAUGHN

In March 2001, Mullah Omar and the Afghan Taliban destroyed the Buddhas of Bamiyan, exploding the statues and reducing to rubble some of Afghanistan's most important cultural relics. That act seemed to epitomize the cultural intolerance of the Taliban regime but also drew attention to the ways in which cultural heritage preservation has become used as a measure of civilized behavior of states in an era of global cosmopolitanism. For those concerned about the future of the world's antiquities, this week another threat emerged on the horizon. In an interview with Egyptian Dream TV over the weekend, Salafist leader Murgan Salem al-Gohary called on Muslims to destroy the Giza pyramids and the Sphinx as a religiously mandated act of iconoclasm. "The idols and statutes that fill Egypt must be destroyed. Muslims are tasked with applying the teachings of Islam and removing these idols, just like we did in Afghanistan when we smashed the Buddha statues," said Gohary, who claims to have participated in the destruction of Buddhas in Afghanistan and was arrested on several occasions under the Mubarak regime.