White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Fact-Checking Has Always Been an Elemental Part of Journalism

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A whole new area of endeavor is opening up for the entrepreneurial. Name it after the ancient Greek philosopher Diogenes of Sinope. He allegedly hunted for an honest man and was possibly the founder of Cynicism.

Verification will become a vital business as the flood of misinformation engulfs us. What can be trusted? What source is reliable? What image is actual? Is the voice or image authentic, or has it been created with artificial intelligence?

Rather than fact-checking becoming outdated, as at Facebook, it will be essential. The source of news will be as important as the news. Publications with a reputation for accuracy, or their equivalent in this digital free-for-all information age, will be revered.

As — whether we like it or not — we all get our current information through journalism, journalism becomes more critical, not less so.

Elon Musk, who owns X, has declared that we are all journalists now. No, we are not.

You don’t have to spend four years in a university to become a journalist, but some reverence for the craft and some on-the-job training is necessary. Skill with the language, a knowledge of history, curiosity, and a desire to find out what is going on and tell people are all needed.

So is the hardest part of the qualification to define: news judgment. This is knowing what news is and seeing it immediately. You also need to be serious about facts and fact-checking.

Fact-checking, which Mark Zuckerberg, the boss of Facebook, has equated to being incompatible with free speech, is at the heart of journalism. The individual journalist is haunted by a permanent fear (“the inner core of panic,” as my late first wife, Doreen, who was a superb journalist, described it) of, “Did I get it right? Is it Steven or Stephen or did the speaker say millions or a billions?”

Any news story has many facts and judgments, most executed under pressure and in real-time. If it is essential, it needs to be gotten out.

After World War II, and mainly because of excellent reporting from London during the Blitz, the BBC developed a reputation worldwide as trustworthy in getting it right. In much of the world, that reputation still stands. But in Britain, the BBC is reviled for being left-leaning and woke-thinking.

The once great news service, United Press International, had a reputation among editors for being unreliable. I never found anyone who could prove that it was less dependable than its competitors, the Associated Press, Reuters and the English version of Agence France-Presse, but the myth was oft-repeated and stuck.

Similarly, The New York Times is regarded worldwide as exemplifying the gold standard for reliability. However, in the United States, many regard it as left-leaning and, therefore, less believable.

That doesn’t mean there are no mistakes, indeed egregious errors; we all make them and suffer the shame that goes with it. The agony of getting facts wrong is real and profound and known to every journalist.

Factual inaccuracy is a self-inflicted wound on a publication. If one fact is wrong, the veracity of the entire outlet is called into question in the reader’s mind.

Ownership is not as important as the integrity of the individual operation. The Wall Street Journal is regarded as being accurate, but the New York Post is thought of as having dubious accuracy, and Fox News is seen as incontrovertibly political, yet all three have the same ownership.

In the news business, fact-checking has to be part of the process. It can’t be glommed on after the event.

Journalism and its army of reporters can only help with facts in some measure.

When it comes to the industrial-scale disinformation pouring out of governments and political parties everywhere — and especially now out of Russia and China — technology needs to be mobilized to fight the technology-generated lies: fake images, sounds and news situations.

The best hope is that technology will be able to fight its own evil; to be able to tag the fake or at least to identify the real with watermarks — where the information came from and how it was created.

The world needs a fact-checking ethic, something that has existed quietly in journalism for a long time but which is threatened to be overwhelmed in the asymmetry where journalism is a small part of the dishonesty spewing out of social media, such as Facebook, X and Truth Social, and from Russia and other mischief-bent regimes.

Meanwhile Diogenes’ cynicism may be the first line of defense, along with the journalism of old. Verify before you trust.

Trump ‘Puts a Bit of Stick About’ and Frightens Our Friends

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President-elect Donald Trump is “putting a bit of stick about.”

That is a British expression which means as it sounds to stir up trouble. In sports, like rugby, it means to play more aggressively. In politics, it can mean to stir up  trouble for trouble’s sake.

Aficionados of UK television will remember when, in the BBC version of “House of Cards,” the prime minister turns to an aide and says with evil relish, “Put a bit of stick about.”

Trump is causing distress, even shock, in the capitals of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, possibly the most effective alliance the world has ever known. NATO has been a force for peace since the end of World War II.

Concomitantly, it can be surmised, Trump’s press conference at Mar-a-Largo thrilled the capitals of China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran. It would appear to them that NATO is coming apart and what used to be called the free world is eating its own.

Trump told Denmark that he might invade Greenland, Panama likewise, and Canada that he would use economic measures to compel it to become the 51st state.

Trump’s final bit of stick, if you will, was to suggest renaming the Gulf of Mexico, presumably to infuriate Mexicans for no better reason than so many of them have migrated illegally to the United States. Pique, just pique, Mr. President-elect.

Allies and defenders of Trump have rushed to his side, largely depending on their lack of a grip on geopolitical reality or because they believe that he must be right because he is their man, their leader, their sage and America’s savior.

Just how are U.S. interests being served by roiling our two large, friendly neighbors with whom we have lived amicably since the end of the hostilities in the War of 1812 for Canada, and the end of the Mexican-American War in 1848 for Mexico?

Trump was enthusiastic about that friendship when he tore up the North American Free Trade Agreement and replaced it proudly with a similar agreement, the United States, Canada, Mexico Agreement, in July 2020, during his first administration.

One can imagine a foolish campaign to seize Greenland, which would tear NATO asunder and give Russia an incentive to invade the Baltic states and, with Europe off balance, to finally win Ukraine.

One could see some future American president eyeing the wreckage and saying, as Richard III wails pathetically in Shakespeare’s play, “A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse,” “Europe for Greenland.”

One can imagine Chinese President Xi Jinping taking any U.S. hostile move against a neighbor in North America as an invitation to take Taiwan.

One could go on, imagining Iran launching a full land war against Israel, and Israel responding with nuclear weapons. Or Central and South America, uniting in hostility to the United States, helping their drug gangs to surge fentanyl into the United States via drones and tunnels.

The Panama Canal is a vital waterway, and Americans did build it after the French failed. Since the full transfer of the canal in 1999, in accordance with the Torrijos-Carter Treaties of 1977, which guaranteed its neutrality, mostly things have worked well. Yes, China has invested in Panama and the canal, but that is no secret. That was going on, as were other Chinese investments worldwide, during the first Trump administration.

The Chinese do operate two terminals on the canal, but they need the revenue from world shipping, just like any other business along the canal.

The canal remains in our backyard, under surveillance. Interfering with its operations would be an act of war by any country.

If Panama is overcharging U.S. shipping, negotiate.

Leave Canada alone. It is our great asset to the north, our kith and kin in democracy and capitalism. Canadians are not a subjugated people, longing to have two senators and about 60 representatives on the Potomac.

Putting a bit of stick about can be some fun. But take it too far and it becomes vandalism.

The Ghost of Jimmy Carter Haunts Natural Gas Decisions

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The ghost of Jimmy Carter may be stalking energy policy in the White House and the Department of Energy.

In the Carter years, the struggle was for nuclear power. Today, it is for natural gas and America’s booming liquefied natural gas future.

The decisions that Carter took during his presidency are still felt. Carter believed that nuclear energy was the resource of last resort. Although he didn’t overtly oppose it, he did damn it with faint praise. Carter and the environmental movement of the time advocated for coal.

The first secretary of energy, James Schlesinger, a close friend of mine, struggled to keep nuclear alive. But he had to accept the reprocessing ban and the cancellation of the fast breeder reactor program with a demonstration reactor in Clinch River, Tennessee. Breeder reactors are a way of burning nuclear waste.

More important, Carter, a nuclear engineer, believed the reprocessing of nuclear fuel — then an established expectation — would lead to global proliferation. He thought if we put a stop to reprocessing at home, it would curtail proliferation abroad. Reprocessing saves up to 97 percent of the uranium that hasn’t been burned up the first time, but the downside is that it frees bomb-grade plutonium.

Rather than chastening the world, Carter essentially broke the world monopoly on nuclear energy enjoyed — outside of the Soviet bloc — by the United States. Going forward, we weren’t seen as a reliable supplier.

Now, the Biden administration is weighing a move that will curtail the growth in natural gas exports, costing untold wealth to America and weakening its position as a stable, global supplier of liquified natural gas. It is a commodity in great demand in Europe and Asia and pits the United States against Russia as a supplier.

What it won’t do is curtail so much as 1 cubic foot of gas consumption anywhere outside of the United States.

The argument against gas is that it is a fossil fuel and fossil fuels contribute to global warming. But gas is the most benign of the fossil fuels, and it beats burning coal or oil hands down. Also, technology is on the way to capture the carbon in natural gas at the point of use.

But some environmentalists — duplicating the folly of environmentalism in the Carter administration — are out to frustrate the production, transport and export of LNG in the belief that this will help save the environment.

The issue the White House and the Energy Department are debating is whether the department should permit a large, proposed LNG export terminal in Louisiana at Calcasieu Pass, known as CP2, and 16 other applications for LNG export terminals.

The recent history of U.S. natural gas and LNG has been an industrial and scientific success: a very American story of can-do.

At a press conference in 1977, the then-deputy secretary of energy, Jack O’Leary, declared natural gas to be a depleted resource. He told a reporter not to ask about it anymore because it wasn’t in play.

Deregulation and technology, much of it developed by the U.S. government in conjunction with visionary George Mitchell and his company, Mitchell Energy, upended that. The drilling of horizontal wells using 3D seismic data, a new drill bit, and better fracking with an improved fracking liquid changed everything. Add to that a better turbine, developed from aircraft engines, and a new age of gas abundance arrived.

Now, the United States is the largest exporter of LNG, and it has become an important tool in U.S. diplomacy. It was American LNG that was rushed to Europe to replace Russian gas after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

In conversations with European gas companies, I am told they look to the United States for market stability and reliability.

Globally, gas is a replacement fuel for coal, sometimes oil, and it is essential for warming homes in Europe. There is no alternative.

The idea of curbing LNG exports, advanced by the left wing of the Democratic Party and their environmental allies, won’t keep greenhouse gases from the environment. It will simply hand the market to other producers like Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.

To take up arms against yourself, Carter-like, is a flawed strategy.

Lloyd Kelly: Painting in Solidarity with Ukraine

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“Ukraine Wheat and Sky” by Lloyd Kelly

When war, like the one in Ukraine, breaks out, writers and artists are never impotent. Writers have the power of the pen and artists have the power of the brush.

Through the centuries to this day, they have used their creative talents as war propagandists or protestors. But the Russian invasion of Ukraine has inspired works in protest worldwide.

In Louisville, Kentucky, renowned artist Lloyd Kelly has painted in solidarity with Ukraine. 

“When I saw Ukrainian children being bombed by the Russians, I felt I had to do something that shows support for the Ukrainian people,” Kelly said.

His picture titled “Ukraine Wheat and Sky” is small, but not in its message. 

From a distance, it depicts the flag of Ukraine. But moving closer, you can see what Kelly called “its tension and motion.”

“I underpainted it with complimentary colors — blue on orange and yellow on violet — to create a tension. And the diagonal lines [from the blue sky to the golden yellow wheat of the flag’s colors] show a motion, a fluidity, like the wind blowing the fabric of the flag,” he explained.

Kelly said he didn’t want the flag to be sentimental — a dreamy, wispy image. “I underpainted it because I wanted it to be substantial.” A painting of solidarity.

He has felt so strongly about the suffering in Ukraine that he couldn’t sell it. “Selling it just didn’t feel right. So I gifted it to people who support Ukraine in a very concrete way.” 

Kelly’s painting captures on canvas what Ukrainian President Vol0dymyr Zelensky said so poignantly in a television interview with David Letterman, “This blue color is a color of life; a color of the sky, space, and freedom. The flag doesn’t have any images of planes or missiles in the sky, any traces of gunshots.

“These two colors are the country of where I was born, the country we are fighting for.”

Kelly exhibits at The Christina Gallery in Edgartown, Mass. His studio website address is www.lloydkelly.com.

Political Class Isn’t Leveling With Us About the Hard Times Ahead

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There is a rough road ahead for the world, and our political class isn’t leveling with us.

As Steve Odland, president and CEO of The Conference Board, one of the nation’s premier business research organizations, said in a television interview, inflation will continue at least until 2024, and longer if things continue to deteriorate with the supply chain and the war in Ukraine.

Particularly, Odland, who serves as a director of General Mills, fears a global food crisis with famine in Africa and many other vulnerable places if Ukrainian farmers don’t start seeding spring crops to start this year’s harvest. Already, Ukraine — known as the world’s breadbasket — has cut off exports to make sure there is enough food for their own people, as war rages.

Odland sees U.S. inflation continuing at 7 percent to 8 percent for several years at best. But his primary worry is global food supplies, as countries face a crisis of new and frightening proportions.

His second worry is stagflation. If the rate of productivity falls below 3 percent, “then we will have stagflation,” Odland told me during a recording of “White House Chronicle” on PBS, the weekly news and public affairs program I produce and host.

Odland faults the Federal Reserve for being timid in raising interest rates to counter inflation.

I fault the political class for not leveling with us — both parties. As we are in a state of perpetual election fervor, we are also in a state of perpetual happy talk. “Get the rascals out, and all will be well when my band of happy angels will fix things.” That is what the political class says, and it is a lie.

We are in for a long and difficult period, which began with the pandemic that disrupted supply chains and set off inflation, and now the war in Ukraine has compounded that. Supply chains won’t magically return to where they were before COVID-19 struck, and more likely they will have further constrictions because of the war. New supply chains need to be forged, and that will take time.

For example, nickel, which is used in the batteries that are reshaping the worlds of electricity and transportation and for stainless steel, will have to  come from places other than Russia. At present, Russia supplies 20 percent of the world’s voracious appetite for high-purity nickel. Opening new mines and expanding old ones will take time.

The world’s largest challenge is going to be food: starvation in many poor countries, and high prices at the supermarkets in the rich ones, including the United States. There are technological and alternative supply fixes for everything else, but they will take time. Food shortages will hit early and will continue while the world’s farms adjust. There will be suffering and death from famine.

The curtailing of Russian exports will affect the United States in multiple ways, some of which might eventually turn out to be beneficial as the creative muscle is flexed.

In the utility industry, someone who is thinking big and boldly is Duane Highley, president and CEO of Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association in Denver. Highley told Digital 360, the weekly webinar that emanates from Texas State University in San Marcos, the challenging problem of electricity storage could be solved not with lithium-ion batteries but with iron-air batteries.

In its simplest form, an iron-air battery harnesses the process of rusting to store electricity. The process of rusting is used to produce power when it is exposed to oxygen captured on site. To charge the battery, an electric current reverses the process and returns the rust to iron.

Clearly, as Highley said, this won’t work for electric vehicles because of the weight of iron. But in utility operations, these batteries could offer the possibility of very long drawdown times — not just four hours, as with current lithium-ion batteries. And there is plenty of iron stateside.

Another Highley concept is that instead of dealing with all the complexities of transporting hydrogen, it should be stored as ammonia, which is more easily handled.

This isn’t magical thinking, but the kind of thinking that will lead us back to normal — someday.

Politicians should stop the happy talk and tell us what we are facing.

Cyberattack on the Infrastructure Alarms Petraeus, Coats

Electric power lines and pylons against a blue sky with clouds.

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War always goes for the infrastructure: take out the bridges, cut off the electricity and water supplies. All that used to be done with artillery, tanks and bombs.

Going forward, it will be done by computers: Cyberwar.

Every day the early skirmishes — the tryout phase, if you will – are taking place. There are tens of thousands of probes of U.S. infrastructure by potential enemies, known and unknown, state and non-state. A few get through the defenses.

Jeremy Samide, chief executive officer of Stealthcare, a company which seeks to improve cyberdefenses for a diverse set of U.S. companies, sees the cyber battlefield starkly. He says the threat is very real; and he puts the threat of serious attack at 83 percent.

Jeremy Samide is chief executive officer of Stealthcare.

As Samide looks out across the United States from his base in Cleveland, he sees probes, the term of art for incoming cyberattacks, like an endless rain of arrows. Some, he says, will get through and the infrastructure is always at risk.

Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats issued a warning in July that the alarms for our digital infrastructure are “blinking.” He compared the situation to that in the country before the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The situation, he told the Hudson Institute in a speech, is “critical.” Coats singled out Russia as the most active of the probers of U.S. infrastructure.

Samide says probing can come from anywhere and Russia may be the most active of the cyber adventurers.

A common scenario, he says, is that the electric grid is target one. But considerable devastation could come from attacking banking, communications, transportation or water supply.

Retired Army Gen. David Petraeus, a former director of the CIA and current chairman of KKR Global Institute, in an article coauthored with Kiran Sridhar and published in Politico on Sept. 5, urges the creation of a new government agency devoted to cybersecurity.

Samide and others endorse this and worry that the government has much vital material spread across many agencies and not coordinated. Behind Petraeus’s thinking is one of the lessons of 9/11: Government departments aren’t good at sharing information.

Conventional wisdom has it that the electric grid is super-vulnerable. But Politico’s cybersecurity reporter David Perera, who consulted experts on the feasibility of taking down the grid, somewhat demurs. In a Politico article, he concluded that the kind of national blackout often theorized isn’t possible because of the complexity of the engineering in the grid and its diversity.

The difficulty, according to Perera, is for the intruder to drill down into the computer-managed engineering systems of the grid and attack the programable controllers, also known as industrial control systems — the devices which run things, like moving load, closing down a power plant or shutting off the fuel supply. They are automation’s brain.

Perera’s article has been read by some as getting the utilities off the hook. But it doesn’t do that: Perera’s piece is not only well-researched and argued but also warns against complacency and ignoring the threat.

John Savage, emeritus professor of computer science at Brown University, says, “I perceive that the risk to all business is not changing very much. But to utilities, it is rising because it appears to be a new front in [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s campaign to threaten Western interests. While I doubt that he would seek a direct conflict with us, he certainly is interested in making us uncomfortable. If he miscalculates, the consequences could be very serious.”

Samide warns against believing that all probes are equal in intent and purpose. He says there are various levels of probing from surveillance (checking on your operation) to reconnaissance (modeling your operation before a possible attack). Actual attacks, ranging from the political to the purely criminal, include ransomware attacks or the increasing cryptojacking in which a hacker hijacks a target’s processing power in order to mine cryptocurrency on the hacker’s behalf.

The threats are global and increasingly the attribution — the source of the attack — concealed. Other tactics, according to Samide, include misdirection: a classic espionage technique for diverting attention from the real aim of the attack.

The existential question is if cyberwar goes from low-grade to high-intensity, can we cope? And how effective are our countermeasures?

Today’s skirmishes are harbingers of the warfighting of the future. — For InsideSources

Postcards from the Baltic Sea: Part I

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Cruise Shore Excursions: Theater off the Sea

By Linda Gasparello

To take or not to take shore excursions. That is the question for cruisers.

Having cruised on five continents, my answer is to take them. The guides are competent — mostly moonlighting high school teachers and college professors — and often they’re characters.

The first cruise my husband, Llewellyn King, and I took, on the Black, Aegean and Adriatic seas in the early 1990s with the now-defunct Royal Cruise Line, introduced us to shore tour theater.

In Constanta, Romania’s largest and most important port city on the Black Sea, our shore excursion guide was a droll fellow named Mikhail. We visited the city not long after dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife, Elena, were tried by a hastily arranged military tribunal that was set up on Dec. 25, 1989, put up against a wall and shot, all within an hour. It was a city still in shock from 24-years of their mismanagement that brought food shortages in a country with dark, rich soil; torture and executions; and, most famously, state neglect of orphans and disabled children.

During our tour of the city, we stopped at a Belle Epoque hotel where, Mikhail told us, “Nazi leaders lodged comfortably in the early years of World War II.” The hotel manager made us feel welcome by setting out trays with tiny fruit tarts and small glasses of tuica (Romanian “white lighting” made from plums) on a large table in a paneled, ground-floor reception room. As we entered the room, the staff, who stood at the opposite end, watched as most of us sampled the tarts and tuica. As the last person in our group walked out of the room, I looked back and saw the staff make a dash for the table, grabbing whatever was left.

We traveled north to the Greco-Roman city of Histria. Mikhail gave us a detailed tour of the city, which was founded by Greeks in the 7th century BC and thrived for seven centuries. He interspersed his commentary about Histria, which became the richest city in Ionia (Asia Minor), with sarcastic comparisons to Romania’s “golden age under the Ceausescus.”

We returned to Constanta on a coastal road. Nearing the city, we saw thick pipes that seemed to stretch for miles along a beach. “That would be a beautiful beach, but the pipes lead to a chemical plant that Mrs. Ceausescu built. She had a doctorate in chemistry, but she did not even graduate from high school. Fancy that!”

Mikhail said Mrs. Ceausescu was nicknamed “Codoi,” referring to her mispronunciation of the chemical compound CO2 ( “C” for carbon, “O” for oxygen, and “doi” which is Romanian for “two”). He added that “codoi” was a word in Romanian, too, meaning “big tail.”

“Her big tail was her nose. She would kill anyone who took her picture in profile,” he said.

“These colors make us happy. They are good for our emotions.” Photo: Linda Gasparello.

For nine days this month, Llewellyn and I cruised the Baltic Sea on the Getaway, a Norwegian Cruise Line megaship. Anna, our guide on a day cruise along the Neva River in St. Petersburg, was a notable shore tour entertainer.

On the bus, as we drove from the cruise ship to the river boat, Anna told us that men in Russia were “as precious as diamonds. So ladies, hold onto your husbands. Do not lose them. And please send us your sons, nephews, brothers, uncles.”

Anna teaches Russian history in a St. Petersburg high school, and she wrangled us as though we were her students on a field trip. She taught us how to say “I love you” in Russian. “Ya lyublui vas. Just say, ‘yellow blue bus.’ We Russians are so emotional.”

The sunny day brought out what Anna called her “Russian emotions.” Pointing to the buildings decorated like wedding cakes along the river, many designed by the 18th-century Italian architects Bartolomeo Rastrelli and Carlo Rossi, she said, “Rastrelli, who built the Winter Palace, which you can see along the embankment, liked pale blues and greens, and Rossi liked pale yellow. These colors make us happy. They are good for our emotions.”

So, too, is vodka. Anna said, “When you have a cold, you drink vodka with lemon. When you have a headache, you drink vodka with pepper. And when you are depressed, you drink vodka.”

But the funny lady was serious about showing us St. Petersburg’s historical sights: no significant edifice on the banks of the Neva or ship moored on it (including the great, gray cruiser Aurora which fired the blank round at 9:45 p.m. on Oct. 25, 1917 that started the Bolshevik Revolution) escaped her commentary.

“Just look at the taste and temperament of Peter the Great. Here is his small, elegant Summer Palace. But across the river, on Vasilyevsky Island, is the Peter and Paul Fortress, which he designed. It was the Bastille of the tsars,” Anna said.

Across from the fortress, she pointed to the Soviet-era KGB (now FSB) headquarters. “That’s the ‘Big House,’ ” she said.

Those of us seated on the upper deck were grateful that Anna was serious about reminding us to duck when we approached one of the many low bridges across the Neva.

“Please keep seated,” she said. “But if you want to be like Catherine the Great and get rid of your husband, have him stand up.”

How emotional, how Russian.

Matroyshkas and Movies: A Souvenir Shop in St. Petersburg

You great, big, beautiful dolls. Photo: Linda Gasparello.

While I prefer to go to souvenir shops of my own volition, I’ve stopped resenting being shanghaied into them on cruise shore excursions. Sometimes, they’re sights that shouldn’t be missed, like the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul: a maze of souvenir shops.

After our Neva River day cruise, we were bussed to a cavernous souvenir store. Norwegian Cruise Line billed it as a “bathroom stop.”

It was just that, for some on our bus. But busloads of tourists, including many on ours, were just raring to hit the mirrored shelves laden with fur hats, amber jewelry, Faberge-style Easter eggs and matroyshka dolls — especially after getting emotional on complimentary cranberry vodka, served at the entrance by young women wearing traditional, red jumper dresses.

Against a wall, near one of the store’s side exit doors, stood colossal Presidents Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump matroyshka dolls. As I took a picture of them, I heard one shopper say, “Same size as their egos.”

The store occupies part of what was once a movie theater in St. Petersburg. The theater’s architecture is Stalinist big box. The huge concrete-slab marquee over the entrance advertised four movies or other events. Riveted onto cement columns near the entrance are metal sheets imprinted with scenes of bears frolicking in a forest, peasants threshing wheat, and people going about their business on a wintry day in St. Petersburg. There is one of Russian troops tending their wounded in the Crimean War – a war that stirs up sacred memories, leading to actions even unto this day.

Power Tower

More is more. That was the approach of the two greats, Peter and Catherine, and Empress Elizabeth asked their European architects to take in St. Petersburg.

Lahkta Center. Photo: Linda Gasparello.

The city’s historic center is a feast — a grand bouffe — of Baroque and Neoclassical buildings, including the Admiralty, the Winter Palace, and the Marble Palace. UNESCO designated it a World Heritage site in 1990, noting, “The unique urban landscape of the port and capital city of Saint Petersburg, rising out of the Neva estuary where it meets the Gulf of Finland, was the greatest urban creation of the 18th century.”

The more-is-more approach is operating today with the construction of the Lahkta Center, which includes a twisting glass-and-steel tower that will serve as the headquarters of the state-owned energy giant Gazprom. The project, which was proposed in 2005, has changed its name (as many times as St. Petersburg) and location, due to criticism from preservationists and residents that its 1,515-foot tower — which will be the tallest in Russia — would destroy the city’s horizontal harmony and violate a law prohibiting new buildings higher than 157 feet in the historic center.

In 2010, the project moved to a site northwest of Vasilyevsky Island, overlooking the Gulf of Finland. It is scheduled for completion in 2018.

Designed by the architectural firm RMJM London, the center’s website says “the tower bears more than a passing resemblance to a ship’s mast, while the building that lean against its base represent the hull. This theme continues through the wave-like bearing structures and the overall organic form of the building, both of which symbolize the power of the sea.”

The project already holds a Guinness World Record. Between Feb. 27 and March 1, 2015, it set a new record for largest continuous concrete pour, with 25,667 cubic yards poured over a period of 49 hours.

Some of the Lakhta Center’s remarkable innovations include:

  • It will be the first skyscraper in St. Petersburg to employ an ice formation-control system. To prevent ice accumulations and help maintain good visibility, the glass on the highest floors will be heated; and to prevent ice formation, the tower’s spire will be made of metal gauze.
  • The center’s lighting will be designed to make it bird-safe during migration in the fall and winter months, complying with the World Wide Fund for Nature and FLAP’s (Fatal Light Awareness Program) bird-friendly building program.

This project has Petrine boldness. While it could suit a man who would be a great, Putin, he has yet to weigh in on it.

 

Gallery

Neva River Sights

Street Life

Soviet Movie House / Souvenir Shop

Graffiti

Trump’s Foreign Policy — Punish Friends, Reward Enemies

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The Great Rift Valley extends from Syria down through east Africa to Mozambique. It is a huge depression with volcanic action, lakes and steep-sided gorges. Think of the Grand Canyon and start multiplying.

When contemplating President Donald Trump’s foreign policy, I think of the Great Rift Valley: the largest gash in the Earth’s surface.

The president, in the incoherence of his foreign policy, is creating great gashes between traditional allies that will leave scars down through history. He also appears to be set on empowering our putative enemies, Russia and China.

Many of us White House watchers think it is quite possible that some of those around the president had questionable relations with the Russians both during the campaign and after the election. Their motivation remains unclear. Also unclear is why Trump is so pro-Russian.

Russia’s motivation is known: It wants the United States to lift the sanctions imposed after Russia invaded Crimea and started a surrogate war in eastern Ukraine.

It is also clear that Russia has an interest in destabilizing Europe, whether it is by manipulating its energy supply or interfering in its elections, as it tried to do most recently in France. Russia has a policy and it is hostile to European and North American interests from the Arctic to the Balkan states.

Trump could end the whole Russian business very quickly by finding out — if he doesn’t already know — who in his immediate circle did what, why and when. He could tell us himself of his involvement.

China is another Trumpian riddle. He campaigned against China for job snatching, currency manipulation, the trade deficit and its incursions into the South China Sea.

In a classic East meets West scenario, Trump, the self-styled dealmaker, was going to sit opposite Chinese President Xi Jinping and negotiate. But when they met at the White House, all points of contention evaporated; even freedom-of-navigation operations by U.S. warships in international waters near contested reefs in the South China Sea were curtailed. Either there was no negotiation, or Trump folded.

There is a Potemkin village quality to Trump’s claims to have opened opportunities for U.S. firms in China. China has not abridged its local participation laws, so U.S. companies doing business there still have to have a Chinese partner, which must have equity control. It is a system the Chinese use to steal U.S. expertise and technology. As to Trump’s claim of Chinese currency manipulation, it has disappeared — maybe it was a dubious issue all along.

If all of this is in the hope that China might stop North Korea building nuclear weapons and delivery systems for them. Well, that has been a vain hope of other presidents. China has no interest in curbing Kim Jong-un for its own reasons and because of the leverage, paradoxically, it gives China with the United States.

But what history might judge as the more egregious Trumpian folly in Asia is his abandonment of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a carefully crafted deal to keep the economies of United States and 11 other Pacific nations growing without China, which would not have been a partner. Now the gap left by the United States is being filled by China, as are other gaps. Europe, deeply disturbed by U.S. softness to Russia, climate change policies, protectionist rhetoric, and vitiation of past practices and agreements, is looking reluctantly to China for stability in a crumbling world order.

The goals of Trump’s foreign policy are obtuse, subject to stimuli known only to him — examples include his unexplained enthusiasm for Saudi Arabia, and his complete hostility to everything done by President Barack Obama, including the Cuba opening. The results, though, are not in doubt: gladness in Moscow and Beijing and sadness and confusion in London, Paris, Berlin and among our friends worldwide.

So far Trump’s exploits are not only capricious, but also very dangerous, slamming those countries that share U.S. values and encouraging those who oppose our interests. These rifts will not heal quickly. Once a nation is labeled untrustworthy, it is distrusted long after the creator of the distrust has left the field. The rifts remain, great gashes in global confidence.

The ‘Quaking Hour’ Of Governance Begins With Trump’s Tweets

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One can only imagine what it is like to be a Republican member of Congress in the age of Trump. What should be a time of harmonious playing, with both houses secure with a GOP majority and a Republican about to assume the presidency, instead is one of jarring orchestration.

The problem is the score written by President-elect Donald Trump. It is discordant and inspires fear among them.

Senate Republicans are not afraid of their leader Mitch McConnell, and their House counterparts do not quake when their leader, Paul Ryan, speaks. But when it comes to the president-elect, there is unspoken fear.

Republicans are not waking to the bright morning of governance, but rather to the “quaking hour” when they find out what Trump did to them overnight by Twitter or some other unplanned communication.

Did Trump ridicule one of them personally, attack a collective Republican action (like the attempt to close the Office of Congressional Ethics) or take aim against a heretofore Republican orthodoxy (like free trade)?

Has he promoted the interest of Russia over the well-grounded suspicions Republicans on Capitol Hill have of Russia in everything, from hacking to aggression in Syria and Ukraine?

Has he offended 27 European countries in the European Union by supporting Britain’s plans to exit?

Has he, perchance, committed the United States to military action on the Korean Peninsula without consulting Congress or our reliable allies in South Korea. Does he know that the South Korean capital, Seoul, lies just 35 miles from the heavily fortified border with North Korea?

There is surely more to come that will cause heartburn with breakfast.

Not all Republicans are climate deniers, even though they may not have liked Democratic prescriptions. Most Republicans are free-traders, and the North American Free Trade Agreement was passed with Republican support. Are they going to be asked to throw in their lot with dismantling it? And what might they get in NAFTA Mark II?

The known points of stress between the Republicans and their leader-elect are now joined — almost nightly — by random pronouncements with huge policy implications.

Trump is exempt from the normal disciplines of politics. He is comfortable with his paranoia, therefore all criticism is the work of “enemies” or fools. He seems to have no icons, no heroes, and no respect for the institutions of U.S. governance or the history that underlies them — hence giving the back of his hand to the intelligence agencies over Russian hacking.

If Trump does not like the message, he trashes the messenger.

This must sit badly but privately with congressional Republicans. They have fought hard over long years to protect the CIA, the NSA and the rest of the intelligence apparatus from being hobbled by the Democrats. So Trump’s cavalier dismissal of their findings must rankle, if not darn right alarm. The links between the intelligence community and leading Republicans are strong and enduring.

Trump will get his honeymoon. Republicans on Capitol Hill will support and explain and excuse the new president. But, in time, there will be a breaking point; a time when the music will change, when Republicans will speak up again for conservative orthodoxy and the going will get rough for Trump.

Tweeting is not governing, and the presidency is not reality television — particularly when you are threatening to upend the world order on midnight caprice.

Beware the quaking hour. It breaks with the first keystroke of the morning, when the GOP finds out what its leader might have done to it and its verities overnight. It breaks for the person who has spoken up and has been ridiculed, singled out as weak.

This is not what was expected from a party winning both houses of Congress and the White House. It is a new dimension in American politics. And the quaking is not just for Republicans.

Humor — The Donald and the Art of the Tweet

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Do not tell anybody, but I am totally tweeterized. I long to see the latest tweet from Donald Trump. I am addicted, dependent, enslaved and hooked to the great man’s tweets.

If there has been one overnight, my day is going to be good. I will know The Donald is in his Tower of Power on Fifth Avenue in New York City, at his Mar-a-Lago palace in Palm Beach, Fla., or at a luxury hotel that he owns, along with some big banks, and all is well with the world because he has tweeted me.

And he is coming to Washington. I am overexcited, thrilled and all atremble that — can my heart take it? — President Tweet will be sworn in as the 45th president of the United States, and the first to govern by tweet.

Tweeting is going to make him the most democratic president ever. He will tweet — forgive me for thinking it is just to me — at each great milestone of his presidency: the start of building the wall; the end of the North American Free Trade Act; the beginning of wonderful health care, for some people; the slashing of that nasty federal income tax; the new Asian order, when China is burdened with high U.S. tariffs and is put in its place — I will not let my imagination go there.

Never will any president be so close to the public (there goes my heart again) as when he speaks to us by tweet, at any hour of the day or night, because it is necessary, or when the great man just cannot get to sleep.

When Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader in the Senate, has the effrontery to criticize the new privatized education system, The Donald will put him away in 140 characters. That is showing the power of Twitter-disciplined mind for you: so concise, so complete, so exact and right between the eyes.

If that Mr. Putin betrays The Donald’s trust in him and starts moving armies around Europe, the tweeter-in-chief will mobilize and let him have it by tweet at whatever hour, regardless of time zone. He will tell us, even before he has tweeted the Joint Chiefs of Staff on what they should do, and we will be comforted. Little me will be thrilled to see this world leader doing what he does best in crisis: tweeting.

I will feel so connected to the White House, or one of his grand resorts, which is probably where he will hang out mostly away from the prying press and the awful tourists. Just remember, all Tweet Man needs is a phone and he is connected to each and everyone of us: no journalists, press conferences, staff meetings needed. Just a word with one of his family members — and action.

Ring the bells, shout from the hills, spread the word — by tweet of course — and tell everyone there is a new order! The middlemen and women are out. A leader is one with his people by tweet, in touch 24/7.

There will be tweets to advise us if Ivanka is having a baby; if there are to be gold faucets at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue; if the British are ending the special relationship; and if Mexico and Canada form a mutual defense pact.

A tweet here, a retweet there and very soon things are turned around: education policy, environment policy, foreign policy, healthcare policy, trade policy and, of course, policies affecting Empire Trump.

What is good for America is good for business. Forget blind trusts, even the blind know what is good for golf and the leisure industry. If you can tweet in the dark, you can see in the dark. Trust him.

The Big Tweet, the one I am waiting for more than for all the others, is, of course, the one we are all waiting for: When President Tweet tweets “America is great again.” — For InsideSources