In the Soviet view, the nomadic Chukchi reindeer herders chose to live in the past, and there could be no future until their way of life was dismantled.

By Bathsheba Demuth @ NewYorker.com, Aug. 15

In the winter of 1919, the settlement of Anadyr, just below the Arctic circle, was a cluster of cabins: storehouses of fox, bear, and wolverine pelts; the offices of a few fur companies; and the imperial Russian administrator’s post. Anadyr was built on extracting animals from Chukotka, the peninsula that nearly touches North America at the Bering Strait. The wealth that resulted from those animals often did not go, as maps would indicate, to the Russian Empire; four thousand miles from Moscow, practical jurisdiction of Chukotka was elusive. Much of the profit derived from fox pelts and walrus went to traders from Alaska, just a few hundred miles east. This made Anadyr a village built by a “capitalist system,” Mikhail Mandrikov, a young Bolshevik from central Russia, argued, which would “never free workers from capitalist slavery.” Anadyr’s workers were mostly indigenous to Chukotka’s tundra and rocky coastline. For almost a century, they had sold pelts and tusks to Americans. Mandrikov and his colleague Avgust Berzin had come north to preach liberation, to impart a vision for a world where “every person . . . has an equal share of all the value in the world created by work.”

The Bolshevik Revolution was two years old when [....]

Shows we are not the only country suffering these kind of kabuki shows...

Video shows People’s Party executive director quietly welcome violent far-right YouTuber back into Maxime Bernier’s event

@ PressProgress.ca, Aug. 15

Top officials with the People’s Party of Canada struggled to contain the fallout after a Toronto Sun columnist whacked a far-right YouTuber over the head with a walking cane at Maxime Bernier’s recent “immigration rally” in Mississauga.

New video from the July 24 event held near Toronto’s Pearson Airport captured the violent exchange between Derek Harrison, who runs a far-right YouTube channel, and longtime Toronto Sun columnist Tarek Fatah [....]

Related - guy who revealed AMI/Enquirer'$s catch-and-kill trove dead; daughter says just fell.

The Lead video @ CNN.com, Aug. 14

A Russian company with ties to the Kremlin made a major investment in a new mill in Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's home state of Kentucky weeks after McConnell killed sanctions on Russia, according to the Washington Post.

way to win a Senate seat: run for president first?

Has all the depth of a segment of "Sixty Minutes" but still I definitely found it worth 4 minutes of my time:

By Jeff Cox @ CNBC.com, Aug. 12

The U.S. budget deficit widened another $119.7 billion, good for a 27% increase over a year ago, according to government figures released Monday.

Total outlays increased by 22.8% over last July as receipts grew 11.6%. For the year, receipts were up 3% in the October to July period, totaling $2.86 trillion, while expenditures were at $3.73 trillion, an 8% rise [.....] There are two months left in this fiscal year, and the Treasury Department is projecting a deficit of just over $1 trillion [....]

The deficit increase came largely due to increased spending on health care and the military. Medicare outlays rose 11% to $66 billion. Defense spending also was up $10 billion year over year to $53 billion.

A two-year budget deal that Trump negotiated with Congress earlier in August likely will only add to the red ink as the spending plan authorized increased spending on defense and domestic programs. Though the tax cut lowered the rate corporations have to pay from 36% to 21%, tax receipts actually are up 3.2% year to date. Individual income tax receipts have risen just shy of 1% [....]

the left makes several significant errors with regard to racism on the right. Perhaps most important, leftists too often conceive of Trumpist politics as rooted primarily in racism, or even an ideological belief in white supremacy, rather than an authoritarian “different-ism” that manifests as racism at times but as distinct (if psychologically similar) intolerances at other times. The distinction matters regardless of whether one wants to fight the racist manifestations of authoritarianism or the full range of intolerances.