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Sochi Ho: Some Sensible Words of Warning Before You Go

By Patricia H Kushlis

The US State Department recently issued a travel advisory to American citizens planning to attend the Olympic and Paralympic Games in Sochi, Russia in February and March.  Often the media ignores or fails to publish the Department’s Travel Advisories.  This one’s circulation, however, has received relatively widespread coverage – from Fox News to the New York Times almost as soon as it hit the web.  

State’s Advisory contains practical information for first time vistors to Russia and reminders to more seasoned ones particularly those traveling to the troubled Northern Caucasus where Sochi is located.

My advice: if this is a trip you plan to undertake, print the advisory out before you head off, take a copy with you, heed its contents, and watch the website for updates.  The information will have been coordinated with the US Embassy Consular Section in Moscow. And a special unit from the US Consular Section (tough but likely busy duty?) will be at the Games to help American citizens in distress. 

Russia has changed greatly since it became the successor state to the Soviet Union in 1991 and certainly since the Moscow Olympics in 1980 - but still not all is sweetness and light.  

Laying out the welcome mat

Putting aside politics – and whatever one thinks of President (for life?) Vladimir Putin – the country, for the most part, will lay out the welcome mat to Olympic athletes and guests:  Much international prestige rides on the conduct of successful games.  Besides the Russians are proud of their own athletic prowess especially in winter sports and want to come off as winners (who can blame them) in the international spotlight:  sports and international politics intermingle in the Russian psyche.

Furthermore, Sochi itself is a long time domestic Black Sea tourist destination for Russians seeking refuge in a less harsh climate – namely the chance to bask in the sun - dating back to the days of the Czars and the country wants to develop it into a popular international resort. 

If there’s one thing that Russia will do to make the Games go off without a hitch is impose tight security.  American counter-terrorism experts may grouse that they have not been involved – at least that’s what Fox News reported – but expect the Russian Federation’s police-state security experts to do everything they can to keep the sites protected from potential terrorist acts.  That doesn’t mean they won’t happen:  remember Atlanta, Munich and for that matter the 2013 Boston Marathon (which if US counter terrorism experts had been in closer contact with their Russian counterparts perhaps could have been avoided).

Inevitable politics

The dilemma is that the Olympics, regardless of location, are natural attractions to groups and individuals intent upon making political statements before an international audience of millions.  This stage doesn’t come their way all that often. Such statements have been made through peaceful demonstrations or occasionally premeditated acts of murder.  Those who make them are looking for front page headlines and top of the news coverage.

The Russian government is fighting jut the latest round of the Chechen rebellion since the Soviet Union collapsed.  Sochi is very much a piece of the troubled North Caucasus.

The Russian authorities succeeded in regaining power in Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, only to have the conflict spread to neighboring regions like Dagistan and among other ethnic Caucasian minorities - like a vial of mercury dropped on the floor. 

Two suicide attacks in Volgograd – Russia's transportation hub into the North Caucasus - in December followed by the accidental traffic death in Moscow of a major Chechen leader just show how acts of domestic terrorism are not far away.  The Boston Marathon murders last April by two radicalized Chechen young men just show how far the troubles can reach.

You Think You’re Too Young and Healthy for Obamacare? Don’t Hike!

 By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Time: a sunny afternoon, blue sky, temperature in the Fifties, no wind to speak of, a perfect day in New Mexico.

Place: Act I: the Dale Ball trail system in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo mountains, elevation about 8000 feet. Act II: the hospital emergency room.

Dramatis personae: Just me and the doctors.

What happened? I love to hike and do so regularly in the hills and mountains around Santa Fe. A few weeks ago I tripped on a rock and the doctors had to clean up the mess: contused forehead, black eye in the making, bloody lip, scraped palms and knees, dislocated left elbow, chipped arm bones.

Charges (so far) for emergency room treatment and follow up care: about $6000.

Cost to me: Zero. Sure, I pay for health insurance, but 12 times the monthly fee is much less than $6000 per annum.

Total cost to you, a similarly situated “young indestructible” who listens to Republicans claiming that insurance rates unfairly exploit healthy young people to reduce the cost of covering sickly old people: $6000. You may be young and healthy, but—believe me!—if you fell as hard as I did, on rock, you’d have ended up as I did, with real damage. Consider this: can you afford to lay out $6000 on top of your worrisome college debt and your car payments? (As for the unfairness charge, the whole idea of insurance is that the cost/benefit ratio works out pretty equitably within a population and over a lifetime.)

The Gory Details

The trail head parking lot was in sight, not far below. The distance I had yet to cover was an eighth of a mile, maybe, after a glorious 4 1/2 mile hike. And the trail, as I remembered it, was perfectly smooth. So why shouldn’t I have been scanning the horizon, enjoying the vista? Except, as I discovered when I checked it out a few weeks after the tumble, there was one rock—one rock deeply embedded in the trail!—and yup! That one rock tripped me up, flinging me off and over the edge of the path. I belly flopped facing downward on a 45 degree slope. It took me a few seconds to figure out how best to get to my feet. Trying that, I discovered I’d have to find another way. My left arm was floppy and useless. Broken, I surmised.

Cradling the useless arm, I reached my car, unlocked it, managed somehow to buckle in and drove (slowly, one-handedly) about five miles through light traffic to the hospital. Xrays showed a dislocation in my left elbow plus two small fractures, from bones jammed against one another as I landed. Re the dislocation, I had a choice: bones yanked back into place with or without anesthesia. I chose not to feel the pain, which naturally meant an anesthesiologist and all his paraphernalia added to the cost of getting me back into action. Meanwhile, my upper lip had two wounds that needed stitching, but an MRI had determined that I was not concussed. Thank goodness! No bed rest required.

And so, hour by hour, procedure by procedure, the costs mounted to that $6000, even though I declined the services of a physical therapist to help me regain full range of motion to my arm once it was out of a splint. Oh ho! say the bean counters! Patients need to shop around. Yeah, right. The nearest alternative hospital for emergency care is in Albuquerque, 60 miles away. And which, if any, xray view was superfluous? How would I know?

Luck and Bucks

What happened to me on a largely benign trail can happen to any hiker of any age who doesn’t pay constant attention to where his/her feet are going—and who does? Just as unpredictable from the point of view of incurring health care costs: appendicitis, with or without complications. And auto accidents happen to the healthy as well as to the chronically ill.

But say you’re one of the truly lucky ones who, for a lifetime, never gets sick and never slips on the ice and avoids every other kind of accident.  So what if you’ve paid for insurance you’ve never had to use! Wouldn’t it be worse to be sick, sick, sick, and get your money’s worth? Meanwhile, your contributions have helped someone else who might otherwise have died too soon from lack of affordable treatment.

That doesn’t seem unfair to me. It seems sane, sensible and compassionate.

But What Will China Choose? A Review Article

 By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Hugh White’s 180-page book The China Choice: Why We Should Share Power has an important point to make, but terseness is not always a virtue. Primers can be as off-putting as tomes, and this primer is more like a plumped up outline or a script for a power point presentation.  As policy prescription it rejects the least grain of anecdotal or narrative sugar to help the message go down—and even the statistics are pretty skimpy. And yet, short as it is, a constricted, severely non-emotive vocabulary makes The China Choice tedious to plow through to its final iteration of the power-sharing “choice” that, White asserts, isn’t so much as considered by many American policy makers (a doubtful proposition, since ruminations aren't always trumpeted). And, yes, I do question White’s clinging to the word “choice.” To his mind, there’s no intellectually-respectable challenge to his really quite sensible prescription, which would have been more convincing, substantively as well as rhetorically, did he not undermine it by mind-numbing reiteration as well as condescending oversimplification. All in all, I was so exasperated by White’s approach that I wanted to disagree with him even though, benighted American that I am, I’d managed to reach much the same conclusion without benefit of his superior Australian thought-processes.

Here’s the first of many restatements of White’s argument. It appears in the first chapter:

 It is...quite wrong to see America as a country in decline, because in itself America remains a remarkably vibrant and innovative society and economy. But it is equally wrong to imply, as American political leaders often do, that its relative position in the world of power is not changing. This overlooks the simple mathematical fact that when we talk about relative power, America’s trajectory is only half the story, and not the half that matters right now. The shift in power is being driven by China’s rise, not by America’s decline [and] there is not much America can do about it.....[That being the case,] America has three options. It can resist China’s challenge and try to preserve the status quo in Asia. It can step back from its dominant role in Asia, leaving China to attempt to establish hegemony. Or it can remain in Asia on a new basis, allowing China a larger role but also maintaining a strong presence of its own.

Strategically, according to White, the power-tilting factors are essentially two: (1) China’s increasingly productive use of a population that is three times that of the U.S.; (2) China’s possession of enough missile-mounted nuclear weapons to seriously threaten the U.S. mainland and reduce the value of the once overwhelmingly superior American arsenal. Wealth, says White, is power, but the scope of China’s reach, even with its massive increase in national wealth, its economic domination of much smaller neighbors and its creation of a blue sea navy, cannot threaten America’s status as a great power. China, like it or not, will have to deal with the U.S. as an equal.

Meanwhile, White cautions, in the matter of countering Chinese hegemony and maintaining presence, influence and/or power in Asia, America cannot count on much help from China’s pygmy neighbors to form an “iron wall” to contain the dragon. The neighbors, as rational players, will be looking after their own interests first.

All of them [the Southeast Asian powers] want America to stay engaged in Asia to balance China’s power [and]not all of them have an equally strong interest in good relations with China [but they]will not sacrifice that interest to offer the U.S. substantial support against China—unless they are directly threatened themselves.

Worse, from the U.S. point of view, “all of them threaten to entangle the United States in their own quarrels with Beijing.”  For America to stay involved with Asia as China’s power increases will require some pretty tricky diplomacy and produce some pretty patchy results, if White is to be believed.

And yet I’m not so sure that the neighbors will be quite as docile and compliant as White expects. Japan is remilitarizing. Not-so-small Indonesia is a sleeping volcano for which ASEAN is an underutilized tool. While avoiding aggression, India continues to defend its contested borders and play host to Beijing’s nemesis, the Dalai Lama. Chinese control of rocks and reefs in the South China Sea is being fiercely resisted. Even backward, poverty-stricken Myanmar is already pushing back, having indefinitely postponed the Myitsone hydroelectric project at the headwaters of the country’s lifeblood Irrawaddy River. China needs the power and is reported to be furious, but the locals can see little or no benefit and considerable harm to their own interests.

Since all of these countries as well as all the others ringing China trade extensively if not exclusively with China, as does Australia, White argues that economic dependence will bind them more or less helplessly to China’s sphere of power. That being the case, given Australia’s increasing dependence on trade with China, I can’t help wondering if it isn’t White himself who’s feeling the gravitation and hoping that a little Sinophilia will protect the economic future of his own country. A fanciful thought, perhaps, but there it is. The hope that a still powerful U.S. will retain a countervailing interest in Australia’s Asian context would be entirely consistent.

Be that as it may, if it would be disastrous for America to go to war with China and self-defeating for America to pull out of Asia entirely, White insists that there’s only one realistic policy path for America now and in the near future: to work toward a cooperative sharing of power in Asia such that all, great powers and small, will benefit. Harking back to nineteenth century European history, he calls it a Concert of Asia.  Whatever it’s called, cooperation would seem to be a no brainer.  Except for the details, of course, where the devil resides.   But sadly there’s no room for elaboration in The China Choice.

Which brings us to a critical gap—or disappointment. As appealingly as he paints his Concert of Asia, White refuses to plumb very deeply its likely appeal or otherwise to Chinese policy makers and population:

Within a few years...China’s economy will be bigger than America’s on some measures. Within a couple of decades, it will be bigger...on any measure....[A]s China’s power grows, I believe it will want to be a great power again, and to be treated as a great power by others....That raises a question for the Chinese and for the rest of the world. How will China use its power? Will it be a harsh bully or a cooperative partner in a regional order? The answers are not clear One thing, however, is clear. China’s ambitions are not compatible with the old order [enforced by U.S. power.]

Do we already have a hint of an answer as we listen to Beijing's bellicose language and watch repeated and sustained efforts to expand China’s maritime boundaries to their historic maximum? What does White think? Or must we simply hope and pray for the best?  Perhaps that's what White means when he concludes his book with a phrase that's no less out of place when uttered by American presidents these days: “May God bless the United States of America.” Given White's advocacy of concerted power-sharing, wouldn’t it make more sense to invoke blessings on all peoples and nations?

A Post Russian Christmas Story

By Patricia H Kushlis

T’was the week before the West's Christmas. Vladimir Putin and his KGB elves were busily stuffing stockings with selective political prisoner pardons presumably designed to forestall untoward foreign protesters from marring the upcoming Sochi Olympic Games and thereby further tarnishing Russia’s image abroad.

First came the release of Viktor Khordorkovsky in a veritable reenactment of Soviet era prisoner exchanges in Berlin. Then out of jail were bounced two still unrepentant young ladies from the irreverent Pussy Riot band and finally Green Peace – all high profile captives charged with crimes and imprisoned at the whim of a capricious fake Czar for deeds that in democratic countries would have passed without notice, jail time, or hence, media mention.  

Ahem  . . . Busy Elves at Work

At the same time Russia’s secret service emperor magnanimously offered Ukraine a short term bailout so that the Yanukovych government would have to kowtow even more to Moscow’s dictates while eschewing a popular Ukrainian association with the European Union.  This association agreement would have also likely resulted in a corruption clean up that could have reached Kiev’s   -and possibly Moscow’s - highest places.

Then there was Putin’s tightening of yet another screw on the vestiges of Russian media freedom by abolishing the state owned news agency RIA-Novosti and replacing it with the new Russia  Segodnya (Today), designed to lift Russia’s less than stellar image abroad.  But is appointing a loudly self-proclaimed hater of gays the right person to head an organization whose target audience is presumably western – not Islamic (or Christian) fundamentalist?

Meanwhile on the international front, earlier in the fall the Russians finally agreed to help rid Syria of the chemical weapons the Russians had helped the Assad regime assemble but only after international inspections zeroed in on Assad’s use of the same against the Syrian population and the US’s decision to use force as the only recourse to deal with them – thereby raising the stakes in that conflagration by several notches against Russian’s single friend in the Middle East.

Unimpressive

I’m unimpressed with these grand Russian pre-holiday gestures – like sprinkles of powdered sugar on gingerbread men and women - of supposed peace, mercy and good will which foremost find their roots in fundamental weaknesses of the Russian system of governance:  Just more examples of an all too powerful and authoritarian leader dressed in the trappings of democracy bestowing benevolence on his supposedly erring subjects just in time for the holidays as well as bending to international outrage after the horse has long left the barn.

Has nothing changed in Russian political culture since Czar Nicholas I sentenced the Decembrist rebels to exile in Siberia after their failed uprising against his inept rule on December 26, 1825?  The Decembrists, at least, had attempted to overthrow the Czar’s  arbitrary rule.

But here’s another piece of today’s problem. 

Russia’s fundamental weaknesses are not all that different from those of the Soviet Union in the 1980s.  The country’s economy still rises and falls on the sale of petroleum products on the world market and that price is in decline.  The lower the international price of gas and oil, the more the Russian government needs to dig into its reserves to fund its growing ambitions abroad and buy peace at home.  The ruble is not a reserve currency, the country’s economy grew by just 1 percent last year and printing too many rubles will simply increase Russian inflation beyond tolerable limits as the Gorbachev government sadly discovered in the 1980s. 

Meanwhile, the North Caucasus unrest continues seemingly unabated – despite the KGB’s best efforts - with two suicide bombings in the nearby city of Volgograd between Christmas and New Year’s and the death of the Vice Premier of Dagestan in a car crash on Moscow’s Kutuzovsky Prospekt too soon thereafter.  Yes, I know that traffic accidents on icy streets do happen – but the proximity of these events does give rise to speculation.

Will wholesale arrests, detentions and the like be sufficient to keep the bombers away from the Games?  For that matter, how will the Putin government deal with the expected gay rights activists?  Can he orchestrate a faux peace at home – not to mention good will towards all at least until the last visitor has left Sochi?  

 

 

 

 

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Note to the Spy Guys: Why I’m (Mostly) Done with E-Readers

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Sick of toting ten pounds of books whenever I traveled, I bought a Kindle a few years ago—the early model, with the keyboard and the e-ink that’s so easy to read in daylight. Unfortunately, that model’s text can’t be read in the dark, which led to some unhappy moments in flight. I’d be assuaging my sleeplessness by reading. Then my seatmate or someone occupying the row in front of me (or back of me) would complain about the overhead light: too bright.

Light or no light, someone was going to be unhappy.

Fortunately, a solution had appeared.  I could buy a new e-reader, the backlit type, and I was sorely tempted to buy one.  If I can't sleep away the wee hours while flying over the Atlantic or the Pacific, sanity requires that I be able to wallow in the printed word.

Except I wasn’t entirely happy with any Kindle by this time.

The problem was something I hadn’t anticipated. I’d noticed some faint lines under certain passages in e-books I’d acquired.  Soon I figured out why. These faint lines were ghosts clamoring to be re-embodied. There was a setting that would allow me to see other readers’ favorite passages from any book I’d just bought.

No, thank you, I said to myself. I can reach my own conclusions. So I didn’t activate that feature.

But an alarm had gone off and a question arose: if any kind of electronic note-storing and note-sharing was taking place, how would it affect my use of the “serious” books I’d installed on my Kindle, the ones I needed for research, the ones with passages that I'd turn into footnotes eventually? Would I be able to delete/erase/obliterate evidence of my selections once I’d laboriously transferred them to my computer? Would I thus be able to protect from uninvited snoopers the thinking (however contrarian, subversive, mainstream, vacuous or just innocuous, but nevertheless my own intellectual property) that had produced my selections?  Even if I'd activated some essentially pseudo delete function, might my notes not reside forever in some ambiguously-labled cloud eternally available to a secretive, over-eager spy agency?

My library and my book store have taken steps that make it impossible for anyone to learn from them what I’ve been buying and/or reading. Can Amazon make the same guarantee? I don’t think so, because Amazon doesn't want to let my data go.  The company intends to study my past purchases in order to entice me with new titles I won't be able to resist.  So far their efforts have been laughable, thanks to what appears to be a dull, unimaginative model of human behavior.  For the time being, anyway, I'm armored against the sales algorithm.   

But that's a human ego thing, and what concerns me here is privacy.  Any attempt to manipulate my purchasing habits requires data storage and data mining.  If Amazon has the data, that data will also be available for misuse by overreaching spy agencies.  Whether Amazon approves or not.  Whether Amazon knows or not.

And I will never know, unless there's an unexpected knock on the door, so to speak.

Not acceptable.

It looks as if I'll have to acquire my serious books in the more expensive, old-fashioned, privacy-protecting way if I can't borrow them from the library without joining a too long waiting list.

As for any e-reader I may own, I’ll fill it with  read-and-forget genre stuff, to provide for minimal distraction during endless sleepless nights in the air.  Packing a mere five pounds of reading material is better than carrying ten.