With respect to Russians in Syria, important linkages figure:

• Were it not for the existence of ISIS, the Russians would not now be in Syria.
• ISIS is a transnational phenomenon.
• The military power of ISIS, compared to the presence of a significant western army, is negligible. The same comparison cannot be assumed with the Russians.
• Sociology: ISIS has no cultural overlap with any civil societies. It is a breakdown phenomena.

We may find it difficult to accustom ourselves to what resembles a fictional world of supervillains reminiscent of Dr. Evil, with a host of like-minded subalterns, grading into a murderous rabble. Yet this, the almost infinitely evil world of a “shooter” computer game, is a reasonable approximation. The Venn Diagram is a useful visualization tool. Imagine two overlapping circles, drawn on a page. You may color the circles if you wish. Slide (or draw) the two circles so that the overlap represents something common between the two. You might try “shared values” for two different cultures. Interesting comparisons, in degree of overlap, might be seen with:

• U.S. versus E.U
• U.S. versus Russia
• E.U. versus North Korea
• U.S. versus China
• U.S. versus Saudi Arabia

Shared values could be replaced by shared interests, with differing results. Even in the case of the U.S. versus North Korea, if the ruling class of North Korea is excepted, there is tremendous overlap, illuminated by the stories of defectors. With ISIS, this is not so. To be mathematically precise, a certain segment of the captive Sunni population prefers ISIS to the status of a minority endangered by the Shiite state. Among that group, there is some small overlap with the civilized world. It is not exploitable as a germinal political force.

In this drama, the Syrians who desire western good for Syria play the part of Bambi in Bambi Meets Godzilla. Hence the direct cause of Russian intervention is ISIS, which has been lensed variously: as radical Islam, or as a religious cult. Perhaps these categories grant it too much. It may be no more than a volcanic eruption of atavism, bursting out of the human urge to kill.

Perhaps, at the end of Part III of “Russia in Syria”, you might take away what appears to be a prescription. But this pot has been boiling for over a hundred years. With that as an excuse, please forgive the apparent digression to Iraq. Your takeaway will be so colored. Iraq and Syria are national fictions, distinguished only by the territorial boundaries of the Western colonial mandates. The French carved Syria, as the British carved Iraq, from the remains of the Ottoman Empire. Suppose you are an engineer, assigned the task of making a vacuum bottle, i.e., something with good glass walls and a cork that keeps out the air. But the specification has a curious aspect: one wall is missing. The customer, who has no experience making vacuum bottles, turns out to be rigid on the spec. This is what happens when a  foreign policy of rigid moral definition is joined to a real situation. Syria an Iraq are not separate.

The military power of ISIS is negligible compared to a motivated military force with modern underpinnings. That Iraq does not have such a force has been blamed on Nouri al-Maliki, the first prime minister of Iraq. This presents an interesting challenge to the argument that the Obama Administration’s failure to, or decision not to (you make your choice)  negotiate a residual presence in Iraq is why the situation has regressed. If there had been a residual presence, Iraqi response to ISIS would have been impeded by:

• Antipathy to U.S. presence.
• Continued presence of Maliki, with corrupting manipulation of the military.

The replacement of Maliki removed the direct drag of his presence. Haider al-Abadi is or was the hoped-for motivational and unifying leader. But with the fall of Ramadi, it became apparent that something deep and pernicious remained. Even without Maliki, the system behaved pretty much as it had when he was running the show. In Western analysis, there is “rot”, which is to be cured by a motivational leader. With the fall of Ramadi, al-Abadi has “failed”, so there is now grumbling that he is not motivational and unifying. I remarked on this in “Ash Carter says the Iraqis Have “…’no will to fight’ in Ramadi”…Patton’s Response”

This is a theme of U.S. policy, that leaders of quality drive the genesis of nationhood. I can’t think of a successful instance. An example worthy of study, and with excellent documentation, is that of Gamal Abdel Nasser, whose successful coup was in large part the baby of Miles Copeland, arranger and trumpet player for Glenn Miller, and – incidentally – C.I.A. officer. One of his several books is “The Game of Nations”. No one could quite figure out why the C.I.A allowed publication. The only explanation that makes sense is that they could not bring themselves to come down on a plank owner.

This digression had a dual purpose. First, to emphasize that Iraq and Syria are not separate. Second, to put you in a Dr. Evil frame of mind. Analysis,  as distinct from action, is necessarily amoral. This is not so different from a kind of mathematics called the calculus of variations, where fictitious degrees of freedom are introduced, worked with, and then removed. John von Neumann’s advice to Richard Feynman was “You don’t have to be responsible for the world that you’re in.” Afterwards, you can slip back into your moral comfort zone – possibly with less comfort.

To be continued shortly.

The Russians are in Syria, and it looks like they want to hold some land. (Reuters) U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon says this will only worsen the situation. The U.S. expresses alarm (CNN). Let us review the moral underpinnings of our concern. The government of Bashar al-Assad, a family based enterprise of the Alawite sect, has committed wholesale atrocities against the Sunni majority. His father, Hafez al Assad, with differing particulars, did the same thing.

The dynamics of the Assad government cannot be dissected from the extended family, or their ancestral home, Qardaha, a village in Latakia. Neither can it be separated from the curious syncretistic Alawite sect, perhaps the only in the world, excepting cults, where the religious codes are secret. The syncretistic part is the curious melding of Islamic and Christian traditions. Hafez al Assad commanded the Syrian Alawites to behave in a more Islamic fashion, and they complied. In place of a coherent set of religious beliefs,  the Alawites are glued by village culture, and the compression of the surrounding sea of Sunnis. In this case, it becomes easy to abstract the concept of a cohesive minority from the usual religious embroidery.

The early response of the Assad government to the Sunni uprising, when it was centered in Aleppo, bears remarkable similarity to that of the 1982 Hama Islamic uprising. The government of Assad’s father, Bashir-al-Assad, conducted a massacre of an estimated 20,000-40,000 residents. The suppression was successful because the social dynamic of Syria’s then stationary village society was not then receptive to conflagration. The massacre was preceded by the siege of a compact city, which could not be replicated in the context of the current, broader conflict.

The history of this conflict has featured  a lot of hand-wringing, punctuated by the new concern that Russian involvement will lengthen the war, thereby increasing civilian casualties. The Alawite army is weakening. Without some fundamental change,  ISIS victory is inevitable. Throughout, international expressions of concern have contained implicit assumptions about who has the right to live, and who is destined to die. Given that the Alawite government has committed atrocities, and that the Alawites have lives of privilege, should they suffer the fate of an ISIS victory? It should not surprise that over the extended Middle East, the degree of concern varies widely.

Since the inception of the Syria uprising, U.S. policy has evolved from complete passivity to  ineffectual support of the scarce elements who affect enmity to Assad and friendship to the U.S. In other words, the U.S. policy has been to find reasonable people and support them. Community development, in Syria and Iraq! The community is a very positive base for social change in enclaves. Unfortunately, the region is not an enclave; it is a vortex of conflict, with a constant inflow, manipulated by religions, ideology, lust for power, and, indirectly, because Syria has virtually no oil, the oil curse.

Into this witches cauldron go also the ghosts of the Great Game, the Crimean War, and the Ottoman Empire, to which all the contested territory belonged before the First World War. The ghosts threaten because

• “Community development”, identification and support of elements that with support could prevail over religious extremism, has failed.
• Russia is a land power, with borders that can never be made secure.
• Sadly, Arab Spring. In a parody of Gresham’s Law, bad elements pushed out good.

Current foreign policy has been much criticized for apparent passivity on Syria, and the complete exit from Iraq. Most of the criticism has the intent of political capital.  The best of it comes from Lindsey Graham, who asks for renewed U.S. ground presence in Iraq.

Many specifics of U.S. policy to date are questionable. Yet even if early policy had been more proactive, more agile, with greater force, and greater cunning,  the desired goal could have remained elusive. Sometimes a desired goal exists in moral, but not practical terms. This is deadly to successful foreign policy. It’s not enough to feel good about what you are trying to accomplish.

In the western U.S., forest fires are not extinguished. They are contained, and allowed to burn out. But in Syria/Iraq, containment is not possible. What then?

To be continued shortly. Until then, prep yourself.

It does not serve the educational purpose of this blog to make a bare prediction without explication. We’re not in the fortune telling business.

I have been reticent about markets also because I have skin in the game. But this is just too juicy.

The Fed won’t raise until 2017, where 2017 is to be taken as the greatest lower bound of “t”, the start date of the open interval.

Political analysis is one of the most developed fields of prediction. This is not to say the pundits get it right; their records are hit-and-miss. But their machinery, involving grave pundits saddled to complex mathematical machinery with 3-D visualizations, captivates.

Sometimes predictive insight comes from an initial question that has no direct connection with the eventual question. Since political pundits seem to have so much trouble competing with exit polls, perhaps a question that opens up the invisible zeitgeist would be a fruitful alternative to the pundit’s complexity and specificity.  What form could the question take? For anyone with a partisan political outlook, it’s a real mind stretcher. To limber up, let’s review the brief years in which modern America was born. We segue with a general discussion of heroism in presidential elections.

In presidential races, heroes have been conspicuously absent, except for the occasional war hero, whose presidency is typically undistinguished or with signs of incompetence.  The traits of the hero are apparently incompatible with those of the successful politico, which involve active trading of one’s principles for the Greater Good of the moment. And yet if a president, in the process of being morally debauched, manages to do some good that outlasts his term, history grants him the hero’s mantle.

If this election, a candidate manages victory with a platform of complete negativity, as in “no more this…and no more that”, it will be a first.  There is always some version of “a chicken in every pot”, which Herbert Hoover actually recycled from Henry IV of France.  Jeb Bush’s version is “4% growth”(annual.) After election, as if to wash away the stains of the campaign, a president seems bound to try to create a myth that will outlast his administration. JFK’s audacity was not to promise, but to demand. His second demand was Man on the Moon. Lest it seem frivolous, the program catalyzed the rest of the technological 20th century, including the computer you are this moment using. But my favorite demand is actually his first, the exhortation of his inaugural speech, written by Ted Sorensen. Don’t make me spoil the invocation of an American Caesar. Watch his renewed demand for the service and sacrifice to the principle  of American Exceptionalism.

The United States of 1963 was a cruel place, where racial and cultural discrimination, police and civil brutality, and demands for cultural conformity were much different from today. Kennedy’s oration was directed at the enfranchised electorate.  The disenfranchised had the Civil Rights Movement. In historical judgment of a president, we must take measure of  political background of the times. Watch Martin Luther King‘s “I have a dream” , the visible pinnacle of the organized Civil Rights Movement that started gaining steam on December 1, 1955, with the arrest of Rosa Parks. Three months after MLK’s speech JFK was dead, his place in the pantheon a debatable sum of the man and the times.

For  the primacy of his role in the enlargement and extension of the Vietnam War, LBJ is one of the most reviled presidents. But his political acumen, a euphemistic reference to necessary moral debauchery, enabled passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 . Instead of a demand, LBJ offered a promise, the Great Society. With war and cruelty subtracted, these turbulent times were the birth of modern America. To our credit, we are not idle inheritors of moral capital; it has continued to evolve under our stewardship.

But in contradiction to the footsteps of giants that we see through the lens of time, JFK and LBJ had personally abhorrent traits. Ronald Kessler’s In the President’s Secret Service: Behind the Scenes with Agents in the Line of Fire and the Presidents They Protect,  is a sobering read. The depravities and personality traits of some recent presidents could not be more disturbing  if it turned out they had their own personal email servers.

The revelations about these  presidents have fueled historical revisionism.  Both seem too flawed for pivotal roles in the authoring of modern America. But stripped of saintly motivations, what happened, happened. We are left to wonder the proportions in which they lead, followed, and drifted with the currents.

The current contenders, apart from lapses of etiquette, deportment, and personal email servers, seem upstanding by comparison. Yet they share the  inability to find in today’s issues, the grounds of potential greatness. Like some sacred religious tome, the legacy of the early sixties has solidified into definition, not invocation.

The question, which claims the promise to unlock future mysteries, is: Why is this so? We could round up the usual suspects:

• The electorate.
• The candidates.
• The American dream, and revisions thereof.

And so forth. To the political partisan, the candidate is the image of salvation, remaining whole till the next Burning Man Festival. You have that much time to figure out the answer. If you can turn in your homework early, you may be able to claim your place at the pundit’s round table.

This OT excursion is only a temporary loss of focus. In search of a place to run this piece, motivated by personal experience, I thought, why not my own blog? It affords the opportunity  to compare the time-honed methods of traditional fortune tellers with the methods of those who currently pursue future knowledge. The techniques of divination may overlap.

The Post-Internet Fortune Teller in Chelsea

Ofri Cnaani, post-internet artist and instructor at the School of Visual Arts, SVA,  has a show at Andrea Meislin Gallery, 534 W 24th St., Chelsea, running through October 24. Ofri has used the cyanotype process, known to us as “blueprint”, to create spaces that, if not dreamscapes, inhabit the same places as dreams. Several other composite works turn computer frustration into art. I am somewhat disappointed with the omission of the infamous Microsoft “Blue Screen of Death.” This computer equivalent of cyanide would have been well served by cyanotype. On the other hand, anyone who has actually experienced the Blue Screen of Death might prefer to forget it. Ofri is a Mac user.

If you would relish the chance to stare directly into Ofri’s eyes, go to the show. It’s part of the “process”, a performance event called, “Wrong Tools”, in which Ofri plays the post internet transmogrification of the Gypsy fortune teller. Gone are the beads and curtains, replaced by discarded computer chachkis. The tarot deck is replaced by one depicting and betraying those who have fallen to the cruel logic of the Internet. One personal possession and two chosen by the participant from bins of cast-offs are melded by Ofri into your personal reading and personal work of art. But two traditions remain: the card flip, and locking eyes with the Internet Spirit, channeled, in this case, by Ofri.

My card was flipped. I wailed in sorrow as it betrayed my fate: “Your posts are being used against you.” Ofri interrupted my lament, commanding me to stare directly into her eyes, “for the process.” Our not-quite-blazing eyes locked for the prescribed interval, during which I was completely unconscious of what happened, if anything. A whir of a photocopier, and my personal work of art was handed to me, sharply downscaled in beauty from the cyanotypes, but a keeper nonetheless.

“Wrong Tools” was a reminder of my own gypsy adventures. I wrote a script about gypsies. It actually got optioned, though nothing came of it. I was diligent. I joined the Gypsy Lore Society. I read such sociological literature as exists from the intense curiosity of sociologists of this apparently insoluble underclass. And with the insane synchronicity in my life, I had a Gypsy quasi-girlfriend (she wanted to hook me, but I didn’t want to be hooked.) Her mom was actually super nice. She had been Jimi Hendrix’s last girlfriend, inspiration for his song, “Gypsy Eyes.”

 The Gypsies (more correctly, “Rom”) of her class were nothing like the stereotypical gypsies, who also exist. In Atlantic City, scouting locations for the film, I landed directly on top, parking-wise, of the last remaining ofisa on the Atlantic City Boardwalk. The ofisa had traditional elegance, reprising the temporary, transportable opulence of a nomad’s lifestyle. The human adornment was an obviously very intelligent and not unattractive young woman and her grandmother. The young woman had all the material to be a lawyer, but was condemned to be married off. How was this to be accomplished? By family arrangement, or by way of her performance art? The question lingers.

In manner and appearance, there was an Sephardic resemblance. Nothing else distinguished her, except for obvious intelligence, and the weight of her gown, which caused her to sweat. By watching the rate of bead formation on her forehead, I had an instantaneous readout of her stress level. Never before, perhaps, was she studied as closely as I was to study her, as, simultaneously, she tried to divine me. Sweat, as every interrogator knows, is gold.

 I was accompanied by the cinematographer. To get the most out of it, I forked over the twenty bucks for a reading. I was  conducted to a tiny back booth, where she tried to script ninety seconds that would not compromise her reputation, so dearly supported by her gown, the rugs, the beads, the spiritual figures and figurines, and several hundred pounds of chachkis.

 She actually did pretty well. I think she might have “divined” three things, two of which I remember:

• Money comes to me easily and leaves me easily. Sure. I had just dropped a twenty on her. Easy come, easy go.
• I have woman troubles. A man comes in with another man. Where is the woman? Play the averages. Ergo, the man has woman troubles.

The ninety seconds exhausted her. Swaddled in the fabric yards of tradition, her glow was replaced by sweat. I cannot imagine how she survived the rest of the day without a change of clothes, into something more appropriate, like a bathing suit.

Perhaps I forget the other things she told me because they were a potpourri of things that are true and false for everybody. For another twenty bucks, I could have had another ninety seconds of her script. But alas for her divination of my traits, easy come easy go has limits. I have my regrets also, but it wasn’t about the twenty bucks. I would have liked to know her better, but I shied from the risk and the pain.

Are Ofri’s “Wrong Tools” the wrong tools for the job? Conduct yourself to Andrea Meislin, compare to my Gypsy experience, and then decide.

Some retrospection is useful. In Buying Yemen, I offered that one of the several motivations for the current Saudi use of the oil weapon is to keep Iran too poor to compete in the bidding for tribal loyalties. In Saudi, Houthis, Yemen & Pirates of Penzance, noting a lack of success in the buying, I wrote, “The  unlimited money of the House of Saud, and evident inability to use it to cause the Sunni tribes to coalesce, is itself a debacle.”

Although Saudi airstrikes are the visible part of Saudi support, the checkbook is again vindicated.  Regaining of Aden by Saudi-friendly forces, which means those friendly to Yemen president Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, indicates that Saudi money has bought some success. But checkbook power is not unlimited. If it were, the Saudis would have bought off the Houthis, and there would presently be no  war. It’s  like scissors-paper-rock. Religion is the scissors; money is paper, and rocks are bullets.

Money works where a fault line can be exploited, and fault lines are what enabled the conflict to grow right through the hard religious boundary of Sunni/Shiite antagonism.  In November, 2011, following the “Arab Spring” event in Yemen, the  former president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, ceded power to Hadi. Hadi seemed well on the way to unifying the country, when the Houthis seized on the practical problems of extreme poverty with a demand of universal appeal, restoration of the fuel subsidy. This activated a fault line among the Sunni tribes, among whom  Saleh commands a considerable loyalty, and, at the time, the largest militia. In politics, the slogan  “cheap gas”  works almost anywhere.

In Buying Yemen, I speculated that the Saudis might buy Saleh himself. The result would have been widespread collapse of the rebellion, and the likely retreat of Houthis back into their native territory.  But Saleh could not be bought.   Plausibly, Houthi promises of political power were more important to Saleh, though he did not broadcast his allegiance until the Saudis bombed his house. In May ’14, Hadi’s National Dialogue Conference claimed transformational progress, with one of the goals disarmament of the militias. This would have been fatal to Saleh’s conception of existence, of tribesmen with guns, bound by personal loyalty to him. A business suit does not a Western outlook make.

Although alliances shift like blowing sand dunes, it was a surprise to find Saleh on the Houthi side, because under his presidency, the Houthi movement’s attempt to fracture Yemen resulted in repression of the movement. The founder, Hussein al-Houthi, was killed by Saleh’s forces in September, 2004.

With a little education on the issues, a little persuasion from overhead, and a little grease on the palm, a Sunni soldier in Saleh’s militia might become skeptical of  promises of prosperity in a new Yemen shared by Houthis with a blood grudge.  A few defections were first reported in May, but lacked the implication of a fundamental shift. The taking of Aden provides that implication.

The Aden supply line runs through the port of Aden, so it cannot be interdicted by the Houthis.  The risk at sea is small, subject only to hypothetical piracy or Iranian pot shots. The compactness of Aden and the security of the rear facilitates force concentration.  This asymmetry favors the Saudi backed forces in the vicinity of Aden.  But as the Saudi backed forces attempt to extend their pocket, with the eventual objective of Sana’a , the asymmetries turn against them.  Aden is on a coastal plane. Beyond the plain,  rugged terrain favors the defender and the harasser.

But the capture of Aden lowers the buy-price for desertion of Saleh’s men.  Since Aden is the principle port,  the Saudis can now offer, in addition to the abstraction called money, the lure of tangibles, such as gas, food, bottled water, and little luxuries as well. Perhaps they can buy enough loyalties to disintegrate Saleh’s tribal patchwork.

Life in Yemen is indescribably hard. Every man has his price. What’s yours?

Quoting Reuters, “Maria Gaidar, whose father Yegor was Russia’s first reformist prime minister after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, was appointed last Friday to be deputy governor of Ukraine’s southern Odessa region, a political hotspot now led by former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili.”

Maria Gaidar is Russian, and she holds Russian citizenship. There is no obvious notation of Ukrainian, or part-Ukrainian ancestry, that would put in a less jarring context the appointment of a Russian citizen to the Ukraine administration of Petro Poroshenko. Her father was a prime minister of Russia. From 2/09 to 6/11, Maria herself was a deputy governor of Kirov Oblast, which, note, is nowhere near the Caucasus or Ukraine.

The demographics of entire Odessa Oblast are not at my fingertips, so here are the (Wikipedia) 2001 demos of the Odessa-the-city,  the largest city and capital of the region:

1. Ukrainians: 622,900 people (61.6%)
2. Russians: 292,000 people (29.0%)
3. Bulgarians: 13,300 people (1.3%)
4. Jews: 12,400 people (1.2%)
5. Moldovans: 7,600 people (0.7%)
6. Belarusians: 6,400 people (0.6%)
7. Armenians: 4,400 people (0.4%)
8. Poles: 2,100 people (0.2%)

The governor of Odessa Oblast isn’t Russian either; Mikheil Saakashvili is former president of Georgia. The strangeness is apparently caused by a desire to find rulers who can’t be bribed by Odessans. But the numbers do not imply that the appointment of a Russian has any particular  political benefit, such as the pacification of hostile ethnics. The appointment of an ethnic Russian, however liberal or hospitable, is vaguely analogous to appointing during World War II, a member of the Japanese pre-war social democratic parties to some mid level position in the state government of Hawaii.

The Odsessans don’t seem to care. The Ukrainian fascists must, but their opinion apparently means little away from the front lines. Maria Gaidar’s motives are obvious. In Russia, her life is in danger. The Odessa appointment is an opportunity to continue in political life, doing…something. From Russia come loud noises of indignation.

A surmise. The field of possible choices for the position could not have been small.  For the position of deputy governor, there exists a huge pool of qualified individuals, both domestic and foreign. Have you ever wanted to be deputy governor of Odessa? Here’s your chance. Send your resume stat to

President of Ukraine , 11 Bankova Str., 01220, Kyiv, Ukraine

Perhaps we are missing something. Surely, somewhere, there must be at least one Ukrainian who is both as honest as the day is long and unafraid of getting whacked by the Odessa mafia. Could it be that there is method in the madness of appointing a Russian woman to a political post in far western Ukraine?

Since Donald Trump would snap up this appointment in a heartbeat, there well might be, a message to Putin:

“If the rebel leaders, who seem intellectually underendowed to the extent that their knuckles drag the ground, were instead, some other  enlightened  Russians, of whom Maria Gaidar is an exuberant example, we might come to terms.”

Perhaps you’ve noticed that I’ve passed on the obvious Greece question: “Will Greece stay in the EU?” This prediction problem draws attention to a paradox. Greece, a parliamentary democracy with a Western ethos, a country to which the West traces a large part of cultural inheritance, is familiar to us. The Greece debt crisis involves other Western countries, with which we are at least as familiar. Shouldn’t the outcome be more transparent to prediction than the comparatively different cultures of the Middle East? All the workings and gears of the Greek crisis are open to minute examination. Russia presents a puzzling combination of opacity and sudden insight, yet this blog is full of Russia analysis.

Something pops out: The difficulty of prediction is not simply a matter of facility to observe. It also depends upon the number of actors. The vocabulary of political science is large, but governments are commonly graded on how democratic they are. The taxonomy of political science is largely inherited from ideologies. Some political science theorists have attempted to renovate the study of power. But the new work is not pointed specifically at the prediction problem.

So it has something to do with the number of actors, and independence. Hypothetically, in a society in which all political opinions were in perfect lockstep, all the actors would count as one. Since the national intelligence agencies have intensive interest in the mathematical formulation of intelligence problems, it’s worth mentioning the analogies to linear system theory. A system is deemed observable if all the internal variables can be determined by external observation. The number of internal variables correspond to the actors. The rank of the system corresponds to the number of independent actors.

But this is not golden, because nothing that has to do with human beings is linear – with the limited exception of trend extrapolation. Trends end unpredictably. In non mathematical terms, the number of actors is huge, including not only heads of government and monetary authorities, but, in a very real sense, the electorates or special interests they are responsible to. Some, such as Alexis Tsipras, are standing on the political equivalent of quicksand. Prediction would be much easier if he were a dictator, but he is not. Modern Greece is a surprising mix of political responsibility that transcends party lines, political irresponsibility, greed, reasonable concern for pensioners, a lack of final comprehension until the cash machines shut down, widespread leftist sympathies, gross hypocrisy, and attitudes and interests that defy enumeration.

The attention of the press is selective, not inclusive. To derive a prediction solution from open sources, it helps to have a long memory, and to be attentive to details as they are reported. The flaws of the euro were discussed, a few years back, when several EU countries had similar crisis. Martin Feldstein’s article emphasizes that in an area served by a single currency,  the workforce must be mobile. But it  was more obviously noted at the inception of the euro that it created a separation between the national power to spend, and the power to mint money. See the Credit Writedowns article, “The Euro System Contains a Serious Flaw.”

Such observations are very old, dating to 1999 and earlier. As they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Thanks to the selective attention of the press, we now have a list of “almost facts”:

• The debt load of the the new agreement could, perhaps, be serviced by someone with the perseverance of Sisyphus, who, because of his deceit in running up national debt, was compelled to roll a boulder up a hill in perpetuity.
• The “Euro rules” disallow the possibility of a haircut for bondholders. Whether this almost-fact remains a fact is critical to the conclusion.
• The Greeks, who, polls indicate, have the sentiment of wealthy communists owning multiple dachas with undeclared backyard swimming pools,  do not have the perseverance of Sisyphus. One Greek explained to me that this is why there are so many Greek restaurants, and so few hundred-year-old family owned companies, like Leitz, Zeiss, Krupp, Bosch, Mercedes, or Porche.  The short, sweet life of many a restaurant ends when it burns to collect the insurance.
• Greece has the most gorgeous weather in the world. Maybe it’s better to be broke there than busy in Stuttgart.
• If Greece were not in the Euro zone, the new drachma could be devalued according to requirements for foreign currency, attracting hoards of Chinese tourists to feast on souvlaki. This is why German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble proposed Greece take a break from the euro,  fixing the flaw described by the Credit Writedowns article.
• The recent rapid shifts of the Tsipras government have two intepretations: intelligent, hardball negotiation tactics, or an unstable mix of ideological betrayal and practical panic. That Greece simply burnt through the previous loans is more congruent with the latter.

So now to the motives. Tsipras won’t have to tell his mother for a while longer.  The Germans would prefer it all to end with a whimper, not a bang. Greece will exit the euro, with a sequence of events as  passively biased as a cataclysm can be.

It’s a tragedy with comic overtones; a fragile, if not defective, economic theory, incompetent against relatively mild centrifugal forces of nationalism within the E.U. Since Greeks, even wealthy ones who own multiple dachas with undeclared backyard swimming pools, tend to describe themselves as leftist, this will be an opportunity to test their commitment to the collective. Suicide, from eviction, or business failure, is one of the most tragic consequences of prescribed austerity.

Communist countries hardly excel at success, but some of them, notably Cuba, have managed failure well. But for all the gushing of leftism, the economic elite are well respected in Greece. The devise of novel structures to circumvent the disenfranchisement of a rogue nation cannot be excluded — if all the “almost-facts”, particularly the no-haircut factoid, hold.

Take a look at a slide show presentation, “Nonverbal Communication in a Police Interrogation.” Compared to Dan Hill’s article, it is both more precise, and more tentative. Now look at this picture of Vladimir Putin, and Russian Foreign Secretary Sergei Lavrov. Doesn’t Lavrov look more expansive and jolly than Putin? And yet, their world views must be very close. From this picture, decide who you would rather go to the movies with. Your buddy Lavrov?

Hill writes, “Reading a person’s emotions is crucial to fully understanding them and it is true that people’s faces best reflect and communicate their emotions.” The implication is that the tools to read other individuals are available to all of us. But  why are we taken in by others so easily? if hidden intentions could be made so easily visible, we would not be so commonly surprised by what other people do.

One way to resolve this paradox is to speculate that people are divided into three groups: the gullible, the skeptical, and the knowing.  The first two are victims of their innate characteristics, while the third, either by Hill’s assertions, or some other talent, are able to divine the intentions of others. But the existence of the third group is frustrated by the characteristics of the psychopath who, by varying estimates, comprise 2-5% of the male population, and about half that frequency in the female.

The popular conception of the psychopath imagines Hannibal-Lector violent criminality, and it is false.  Psychopaths are all over the place. They are particularly evident in the workplace, where it isn’t possible to choose your companions. Like all other human traits, they exist on a continuum, meaning there is no particular boundary at which a person is normal or nuts. Unfortunately for nice guys, the traits of the psychopath are advantageous in certain professions, such as CEO, or surgeon.

Analysis of facial expressions is a part of the division of psychometry concerned with personality traits. The lie detector, actually a variety of devices that measure involuntary responses that accompany emotions, is a tool of the same interrogators who train from  the slide show. The psychopath can defeat both types of tools, because his involuntary responses are decoupled from what he is actually thinking. So are his emotions. The weakness of the psychopath’s emotionality is a boon for survival in some kinds of situations. An extension of the ability to fluently lie, it is in some way the attempt of a “selfish gene” to propagate, in a preference for individual survival over that of  the group.

Refer again to the flashing pictures of Dan Hill’s article, and compare to Lavrov’s broad, toothy smile. Putin’s face is highly expressive, and not artificially pleasant — exactly the opposite of the psychopath, the type science most closely identifies with the religious “has no soul.” Lavrov’s toothy smile says he’s the guy you want to go to the movies with. But on the continuum of psychopathology, Lavrov is probably a little higher on the scale — an asset for constant exposure on the world stage.

The psychopath confounds the bullshit detector with the opposite assertion: The man you think you can trust is the man you can’t. Professional interrogators know  this. But they don’t look for souls; they look for “tells”, the body language by which a poker player sizes up his opponent. For instance, a subject may, when evasive, avert his gaze in the direction of his dominant cerebral hemisphere. Human variability, which Dan Hill conveniently ignores, is partly factored out by a process of calibration of the individual under interrogation. This is why a lie detector examination includes a large variety of inane questions, offered at irregular intervals. Only by comparison can the interrogator obtain information with even a probability of correctness.

In case you have been mislead by the picture of Kerry and Lavrov, you should go  to the movies with Kerry. Lavrov will eat all the popcorn.

Reuters has run a really silly article, “Want to know Vladimir Putin’s secrets? They’re all right on his face.” On other occasions, I’ve responded to silly articles with dour condemnation, for example, when Reuters engaged a comic-book writer to critique the F-35. But Dan Hill’s article, which touches on whether Putin has a soul, offers all kinds of opportunities to be silly myself. I try to keep open source intelligence a serious endeavor, which means a limit on how far I am willing to go, publicly, on a hunch. But with Putin’s soul on the table, the sky’s the limit.

The article cites Bush the Second and Joe Biden as having conducted ophthalmic examinations of Putin’s eyes. Although not visible in official pictures, Bush and Biden must have used the opthalmic instrument known as the funduscope to clearly image Putin’s retinas. No mention is made of cataracts or macular degeneration, although Drs. Bush and Biden differed as to whether a soul was observed. Since the medical records do not indicate that Putin’s eyes were dilated for the examination, it is hard to understand the confidence of the examining physicians regarding the presence or absence of soul pathology.

Somebody, somewhere, said  “the eyes are the windows of the soul”, and it was catchy. The great authority, Spirit Science and Metaphysics, says it’s true, so it must be. This is why the U.S. Government, as part of the security clearance process, looks long and carefully into the applicant’s eyes, and notes the presence or absence of a soul. It is a requirement for many responsible positions that the applicant have a soul, with exceptions made for bond traders and bank presidents. And, as is well known, in criminal courts adhering to English common law, the presence or absence of a soul is admissible evidence. In cases of doubt, innocence or guilt can be established by ducking, stocks, or trial by fire.

Further adding to the mess is the recollection of New Yorker columnist Evan Osnos. Quoting the Reuters article, “An unfazed Putin, Biden recalled during a later conversation with the New Yorker’s Evan Osnos, replied with a smile, ‘We understand one another’.” Testimony by Osnos would be inadmissible hearsay. And, of course, Putin is protected by the Fifth Amendment from direct questioning about his soulfulness.

The above, and the contradictory findings of Drs. Bush and Biden, raise doubt as to whether the finding of soul should be admissible evidence into the trial of a person’s character. If at some point in the future, Putin is brought to trial before the International Criminal Court, he might try to have the case dismissed, based upon his uniquely variable condition of soul capacity. In all the annals, it is has been either one or the other.

Whether Putin has a soul must be left to some future occasion, when perhaps, an impartial panel of experts armed with the most modern opthalmic equipment will reach a firm conclusion. So let us move on.  In preface, I am no apologist for Putin.  Putin’s destruction of the free press, and other transgressions against Western ideals, are tragic. When he revived nationalism within the borders of Russia, I thought it was an ugly curiosity. Partnering with a bunch of apes to tear apart Ukraine is unforgivable.

Nevertheless,  four paragraphs of a Reuters article devoted to an idea as tenuous as the soul, and an idea is all it is, contributes to the demonization of Vladimir Putin. This simplification is unhelpful to understanding someone who, at this moment, must be considered our opponent. As  they are understood by the superstitious, demons are very simple entities, because they serve only one purpose, “evil”,  so abstractly pure, it supposedly, according to believers, requires no further explanation. But Putin has all kinds of motives. He may believe many or all of them are good. He may believe others are excusable errors, or casualties of circumstance, such as the shooting down of MH-370. The mix is infinite. Demonization deprives us of the ability to see him as a complex individual, a creation of his time, his country, his life experiences, and personality: the combination psychologists call nature/nurture. For those of you who stare into people’s eyes, I have few words. Modernize yourselves; read William James’ monument, Psychology. It’s been in print since 1892.

To be continued shortly.