Titled Preview of the War We Do Not Want, Collier’s devoted their whole 130 page October issue to how a war with the USSR might ignite and how the US – and its allies from the UN – would win that war. And it seems as if Collier’s took the whole thing very seriously, enlisting government help and even going so far as to tap Edward R Murrow, famous for his wartime broadcasts from London, to write an article titled A-Bomb Mission to Moscow, in which he is implanted into a B-36 bomber crew on a mission to nuke Moscow.

According to Strange Maps, Collier’s introduces the issue thus:

“To warn the evil masters of the Russian people that their conspiracy to enslave humanity is the dark, downhill road to World War III; to sound a powerful call for reason and understanding between the peoples of East and West — before it’s too late; to demonstrate that if the war we do not want is forced upon us, we will win.”

The cover clearly shows the US in Korean War UN mode, as on the MP’s helmet the US flag sits next to the UN flag. Meantime, UN flags are planted over Moscow and the Ukraine, to signal, one would guess, UN occupation.

Yglesias wonders how the UN could have supported the invasion, given the USSR’s position on the UN security council, but the Parallax Brief knows that the UN’s Uniting for Peace resolution allows for matters to be dealt with by the General Assembly where the Security Council fails to act.

Unfortunately, the Parallax Brief couldn’t find much detail beyond what he could deduce from the cover, let alone the full magazine in PDF or scanned format online, but after some Googling, he did manage to find on Conelrad the below summary of how the magazine saw the war unfolding. Enjoy!

PRINCIPAL EVENTS OF WORLD WAR III

1952

Assassination attempt on Marshal Tito’s life, May 10th, precipitates Cominform-planned uprising in Yugoslavia. Troops from satellite nationsof Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary, backed by the Red Army, cross borders. Truman terms agression “Kremlin inspired.”; Reds call it “an internal matter.”

Third World War begins when Moscow, still insisting that uprising is “the will of the Yugoslav people,” refuses to withdraw Red Army units. Stalin miscalculates risk: had believed U.S. would neither back Tito nor fight alone. U.S. is joined by principal UN nations in declaration of war.

Neutrals include Sweden, Ireland, Switzerland, Eqypt, India and Pakistan.

Saturation A-bombing of U.S.S.R. begins. Avoiding completely population centers, West concentrates on legitimate targets only. Principal objectives: industrial installations; oil, steel and A-bomb plants.

Communists throughout West begin sabotage campaign. Trained saboteurs open attacks in U.S.

General Vassily Stalin, aviator son of Red dictator, becomes a UN prisoner of war.

Red Army, under vast air umbrella which outnumbers UN planes five to three, attacks across north Germany plane, in Baltic countries and through Middle East.

UN Troops, fighting for time, retreat on all fronts, suffering many losses.

North American continent invaded when Red Army, in combined air-sea operation, lands in Alaska, occupying Nome and Little Diomede Island.

Reds A-bomb London and UN bases overseas.

Far East “Dunkerque” takes place when, under unremitting air and submarine attacks, U.S. occupation forces evacuate from Korea and Japan.

U.S. A-bombed for first time when Red air force hits Detroit, New York and A-bomb plant at Hanford (Washington). Civil defense proves inadequate.

Turning point in war’s first phase reached with atomic artillery smashes enemy on Christmas Day in Europe.

1953

U.S. A-bombed for second time. Bombers hit Chicago, New York, Washington and Philadelphia. Red submarines fire atomic-headed missiles into Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Norfolk (Virginia) and Bremerton (Washington). Casualties greatly lessened by improved civil defense procedures.

UN air forces finally achieve air superiority over battle fronts.

Psychological warfare begins to play an imporant role; propaganda emphasizes that UN is fighting war of liberation for Russian people; leaflet raids and broadcasts warn Russian people to evacuate area scheduled for attack.

Moscow A-bombed midnight, July 22nd, by flying B-36s in retaliation for Red A-bomb terror raid on Washington. Planes flying from U.S. bases destroy center of Moscow. Area of damage: 20 square miles.

Suicide task force lands behind U.S.S.R. borders, destroys Soviets’ last remaining A-bomb stockpile in underground chambers of Ural Mountains. Of 10,000 paratroopers and airborne units, 10 percent survive.

UN General Assembly issues momentous war-aims statement known as “Denver Declaration.”

Underground forces in satellite countries receive arms and materials in UN plane-drops; highly trained guerrilla fighters parachute into U.S.S.R. to aid resistance movements and destroy specific targets.

Severest rationing since beginning of war introduced in U.S.

Yugoslav guerrilla fighters begin to tie down large numbers of Red troops.

1954

A captured Soviet general reports disappearance of Stalin, reveals that MVD (secret police) Chief Beria is new Red dictator.

Uprisings take place in U.S.S.R. and satellite nations. UN parachutes Russian emigres into Soviet Union to aid dissident groups.

UN offensive begins on all fronts as West at last gains initiative.

Red Army gradually retreats, then disintegrates under onslaught of UN air and ground forces.

Three Red generals desert to UN forces.

UN armored spearhead captures Warsaw, reaches Pripet Marshes in Poland. Another armored column crosses U.S.S.R. border into Ukraine.

UN forces clear Asiatic Turkey and cross border into Crimea.

Marines, in combined air-sea operation, capture and occupy Vladivostok.

1955

Hostilites cease as U.S.S.R. degenerates into a state of chaos and internal revolt.

UN forces begin occupation duties in satellite nations and Ukraine.

UNITOC – United Nations Temporary Occupation Command – set up in Moscow.

Although central bankers and economists assumed that advances in economic understanding — a significant portion of which came from Bernanke — had made depressions avoidable, Japan’s oft-discussed lost decade of deflation raised some uncomfortable questions.

Here was a nation not unlike the US and large Western European countries, with a powerful industrial base, sophisticated financial sector, and a modern, mature economy, which became mired in monetary quicksand, unable to exfiltrate itself from economic stagnation, despite following the playbook economists throught could avoid just such scenarios. Why?

Bernanke thought he had the answer: according to Paul Krugman, Bernanke and the Fed “have been gaming out what they would do if “it” happened here for years,” and had come up with a package of unconventional monetary actions with opaque names like ‘quantitative easing’, and ‘balance sheet expansion’, as well as the somewhat more explicit ‘use of the printing press’.

Whatever the names meant, the idea was simple. When interest rates are at zero, conventional monetary policy, which seeks to influence the economy by making credit cheaper or more expensive (and thereby making money more plentiful or scarce), reaches its logical limit. Interest rates cannot drop below zero, because nobody receives a fee to take a loan, or, the other way around, a creditor does not pay interest to the borrower.

But if interest rates are at or near zero, making credit as cheap as it possibly can be, and therefore money as plentiful as it possibly can be, yet the economy is still falling off a cliff, and inflation is still plunging toward negative figures, monetary policy must look for alternatives if it wants to gain leverage.

Which is where Bernanke’s opaque names make an appearence. Those alternatives are to expand the balance sheet, which involves the Fed buying government bonds to ensure long term interest rates remain low, and buying securities (bonds, or even stocks) to make sure markets are liquid. This is done by printing money, to make it more plentiful and therefore cheaper.

Bernanke believed that by aggressively enacting this program, he could help America avoid the calamity of a ‘lost decade’ of economic stagnation and deflation.

Not so fast, Mr Bond, says Noam Scheiber:

Today’s daily economic report from Goldman Sachs performs a fascinating exercise: It tries to measure the power of the Fed’s so-called “unconventional easing.”

[…]

Goldman tried to figure out is how much in the way of assets you’d have to buy up to replicate the effect of, say, another 1 percentage point drop in interest rates. Their answer: about $1 trillion to $1.6 trillion.

Now that sounds like a lot. And Goldman certainly thinks it is. They write: “These are clearly huge numbers, especially when compared with the Fed’s current balance sheet ($1.9 trillion, of which securities [asset purchases like the kind we're talking about] held outright make up roughly one-third).””

This scares the bejesus out of Krugman:

“One thing Noam Scheiber doesn’t mention in his summary above is the extent to which this result, if true, strikes at the heart of Ben Bernanke’s strategy for dealing with the crisis.”

And a key element of the strategy was altering the composition of the Fed’s balance sheet — that is, unconventional easing.

But that tool isn’t proving very potent.”

In other words: it’s not going to work. And perhaps this explains why flooding the economy with liquidity is proving ineffective (what Keynes described as “pushing on a rope”).

At current levels, the Fed’s interest rate, according to Krugman, ‘should’ be at minus 6%, meaning the Fed would potentially have to expand its balance sheet by nearly USD10 trn (USD10,000,000,000,000) to have an effect equivalent to setting interest rates at the level the economy currently requires.

Houston, the Fed has a problem.

The conclusion that Krugman and Scheiber avoid (probably because they’ve already made it ad nauseum) is that fiscal stimulus is going to have to step into the breach.

Sorry Chicago School, but monetary policy has reached its limit. We’re all Keynesians now.

During Ms. Parallax’s miserable week in traction in Room 101 ward 404 five weeks ago, the Parallax Brief’s views of the bribery and pared care pervasive in the hospital developed from seeing it as being a case of cheeky graft and apathy to be expected of low paid workers in a society where corruption is commonplace to viewing it as a brazen effort by wicked people to exploit for monetary gain their power of life and death, comfort and pain, and full recovery or chronic suffering.

The Parallax Brief felt obliged to play the game in the form of bars of chocolate, a bottle of bourbon and some hard currency while his good lady was under their care, but he now saw no reason to line the pockets of these racketeers for removing the plaster. If they assumed the foreigner in the shirt and tie would recompense them for a job well done because he slipped the odd bribe before, let them think that – no further services were needed, so disappointment for non-payment would not have repercussions.

But the plaster was removed, and farce ensued.

Ms Parallax Brief hobbled in on crutches, clearly upset that her leg was painful and angry looking and that she was still unable to walk. Meantime, the doctor stood over the Parallax Brief’s shoulder like a pending day, making no attempt to disguise his pavlovian expectation of a juicy payoff; Ms. Parallax stared the stare of a woman who wishes to communicate by facial expression alone the sentence “pay the man so we can get out of here or I’ll render you infertile”; and her father stood near, elbow nudging while muttering “he wants paying” several times under his breath.

About three minutes of this toe-curling purgatory was all it took to break the Parallax Brief, and against his better judgment he whipped out a thousand ruble note, handed it to the doctor and walked off in a self-loathing pique to hail a taxi.

But then the guards who control the entrance wouldn’t let the taxi into the main compound. Didn’t they understand, the Parallax Brief explained in the most forthright terms, that Ms. P is in the hospital on crutches, and it would be dangerous to negotiate the steps and ramps, which are covered in sheet ice? “Hospital policy. Under no circumstances can we break the rules.” But that’s absurd. It’s a hospital! How can you possibly have rules when patients who can’t walk have to come out all the time? “You don’t understand. It’s simply impossible. That’s the rules”.

200 rubles later, the rules had been broken and Ms. P was safely on her way home, but the experience provided the Parallax Brief with a lightning bolt revelation: the hospital’s business model is like that of a taxi firm.

Now, the Parallax Brief doesn’t know how taxi firms work elsewhere, but in the UK the taxi driver provides his own car, radio, etc, and every week pays the firm a certain amount of cash, but then gets to keep all the fares he receives. Likewise, the doctors in the hospital we went to provide their own medical expertise and time for negligible remuneration in exchange for being able to use the premises to extort bribes. Meantime, the guards sit and monitor the access gates for a measly salary, but get to keep whatever they can rustle from those who want to get private vehicles near an entrance door.

It’s the taxi firm business model working in a hospital.

Now, the Parallax Brief expects this from unhinged demagogues like Anne Coulter or Rush Limbaugh, but he holds intellectuals like Charles Krauthammer to higher standards. Yet here is Krauthammer, in his very next Washington Post column, “Obama’s Manifesto”, lying:

“Conservatives take a dim view of the regulation-bound, economically sclerotic, socially stagnant, nanny state that is the European Union. Nonetheless, Obama is ascendant and has the personal mandate to take the country where he wishes. He has laid out boldly the Brussels-bound path he wants to take.”

Miss that? Krauthammer has crafted a paragraph which silkily skewers Obama without criticising him directly. He presents conservatives’ views of Europe to imply that Europe isn’t really a good place to live, and merely states that Obama’s polices match more closely those preferred in Europe.

However, Krauthammer doesn’t actually present the conservative’s ‘views’ of Europe, as he would have by writing “Conservatives dimly view the European Union as…” He  instead writes “Conservatives take a dim view…” followed by four phrasal adjectives, which paint a negative picture. In other words, Europe is a bad place, and that’s why conservatives take a dim view.

Of course, the first two phrasal adjectives  — “regulation-bound” and “economically sclerotic” — are not false, as the Parallax Brief thinks its fair to say that the US is more economically dynamic and free of regulation than,  say, France, and the last — nanny state — can be defended as anything.

But the third, “socially stagnant”, slipped in like a pork barrel project paperclipped to a lengthy piece of legislation at midnight, is clearly an outright lie: the EU is not socially stagnant when compared to the US.

In fact, the US finds itself at the bottom of the heap when it comes to social mobility: in the US, a boy’s future is far more dependant on his father’s standing than it is in, say, the socialist dystopia that is Norway, as this graph from the Economist shows:

The devilish subtlety of Krauthammer’s lie makes it particularly pernicious. It is designed to seep unnoticed into the conscious as a fact: in social-democracies you can’t get ahead – and that runs contrary to the American dream.

The Parallax Brief believes that lies are not required to justify the American way. It’s vibrant society, ingenious and dynamic businesses and remarkable achievements and innovation should be enough.

Shame on Charles Krauthammer.

“The head of Russia’s anti-narcotics service, Victor Ivanov, said that seizures of Afghan heroin were up 70%.

Mr Ivanov, a former KGB officer and senior Kremlin official, said the flood of the drug from Afghanistan posed a threat to Russia’s national security. […] He said the drug was partly to blame for rising crime and a fall in Russia’s population. “In recent years Russia has not just become massively hooked on Afghan opiates, it has also become the world’s absolute leader in the opiate trade and the number one heroin consumer,” he said in a report made available to reporters.

“Drug trafficking has become a key negative factor for demography and a blow to our nation’s gene pool… [and] a challenge to Russia’s civilisation.”

The Russian health ministry says Russia has up to 2.5 million drug addicts out of a population of some 140 million, most of them aged between 18 and 39.”

This stunning statistic slams home a malignant double whammy for Russia. Not only does heroin addiction reap its usual icy devastation on individual and community, it also helps oil the motor of demographic decline by doing so to the most fertile age group.

To date, Russian drug policy has centered on a zero tolerance approach of tough punishment, cold-turkey withdrawal and willpower.

A BBC photographic essay on a drug rehabilitation program in Yekaterinburg, where, according to the corporation, heroin has claimed the lives of over 50,000 out of a population of 1.3 mn since 1999, offers further insight:

“Addicts who come to the all-male centre at Izoplit [run by a private fund Drug-Free City], most of them at the insistence of their parents, spend the first 27 days “in quarantine”.

They live together in a crowded, barred room, fed on a “monastic diet” of bread and water to clean their system.

[…]

Addicts are asked to handcuff themselves to their bunks initially, to keep them restrained during the agony of lomki (cold turkey).”

Such methods are sharply criticised by NGO Human Rights Watch, which says that Russian efforts at treatment are “compounding the country’s serious illicit drug use and drug dependence problem and further putting drug users at increased risk for other serious diseases.”

HRW criticized the paucity of rehabilitation treatment, arguing that research “has clearly established that detoxification treatment on its own is not effective treatment”, but said that many drug users don’t even seek treatment because of the “state policy under which drug-dependent persons who voluntarily seek treatment are put on a drug-user registry. This registry is used to restrict drug users in their rights and is perceived as stigmatizing by most drug users.”

However, first among HRW’s criticisms was that Russian policy explicitly prohibited “the use of effective and best researched drug dependence treatment approach for opiate dependence, methadone or buprenorphine maintenance treatment.”

Methadone, a synthetic opioid, is favoured in the West as a treatment because of its ability to relieve craving, suppress withdrawal symptoms, and block the euphoric effects associated with heroin. However, in Russia, to discuss its use is heretical, according to the New York Times:

“Methadone has critics in many countries, who argue that it replaces one form of opiate addiction with another; in Russia even talking about it can provoke legal sanction.

“There is no possibility to have a normal discussion about this issue,” said Dr. Vladimir D. Mendelevich, director of the Institute for Research Into Psychological Health, in Kazan, 500 miles east of Moscow.

After the conference in February, which Dr. Mendelevich helped organize, Moscow’s legislature began an inquiry into whether he had engaged in “drug propaganda,” and it called on prosecutors to open a case against him, he said.

Several years ago, prosecutors filed administrative charges against him after he posted reports on methadone treatment to his Web site. The charges were eventually dropped, but he was forced to take down the site.”

Of course, methadone is not perfect, but by bringing addicts into the system, it frees them from the need to engage in criminal activities to feed their cravings, puts in place a structured program for detoxification and rehabilitation, and provides support beyond ad-hoc individual efforts to quit.

Even in the West, however, many view rehabilitation and methadone programs with disdain. Will power, for them, should be enough. Social stigma, rather than being a barrier for seeking treatment, is an effective incentive to quit or never start. Besides, they wonder, why should their taxes go ‘mollycoddling’ ‘junkies’?.

The Parallax Brief suspects Ivan Six-Pack holds similar views, and HRW admits as much in its report, arguing that the Russian “…public often blame drug users for their failure to overcome their drug dependence.”

Often, the Western press slothfully assumes that there remains in modern Russia at least the remnants of the Soviet aversion to frank discussion social problems, and this, combined with an autocratic, cruel government ill suited to dealing with modern problems, is the basis of a Russia’s tough drug policy.

This, however, would be wrong: it is simply an extension of the public opinion.

An introduction to the Parallax Brief’s ‘Conservative Russia’ series can be found here.

Fiscal policy is buttressed on a low, flat rate of income tax (13%), and there is virtually no social safety net, with spending on unemployment security, medical provision, disability aid, infrastructure, the environment, and urban regeneration far lower, in both absolute terms and as a percentage of GDP, than its G8 contemporaries.

Similarly, military spending is high in comparison — and growing — medical care is available free in theory, but requires private insurance or additional cash payment in practice, and businesses are in reality pretty un-regulated.

If that doesn’t sound to you like a set of policies Newt Gingrich or William F Buckley would support, then you don’t know your dyed in the wool conservatives from your woolly jumper wearing liberals.

The Parallax Brief believes, however, that these government policies are generally matched by the views of Ivan Six-Pack. Now, the Parallax Brief had been led to believe by his pinko sociology teachers in college that communism taught progressive views on gender, race, immigration and class, so it therefore came as a shock to find when he moved here that after 80 years of Marxist indoctrination, young ladies in Russia often reject feminism, men ooze with unrepentant machismo, and the population appears to generally support a penal code that could have been based on Dostoyevsky’s work.

The Parallax Brief passes no judgment on Russia’s conservatism (beyond finding it ironic that those who criticise Russia the most would like similar policies implemented in their countries (I’m thinking of you Charles Krauthammer, Ed Lucas, Anne Applebaum and the Republican Party)), but does view it as the foundation from which Russia can be better understood, and its news and policies better analysed.

With this in mind, over the coming weeks, the Parallax Brief will highlight news which he believes can be viewed best through the prism of ‘conservative Russia’, and hopes that in doing so he can provide a fresh and oft ignored perspective on Russian life – as well as, of course, stimulating debate.

First up, on Wednesday 11 March, will be Russia’s recent admission that it is the world’s leading heroin user.

More Missile Shield Misunderstandings was forwarded by a reader to a former US Defense Department analyst, who has penned the following withering rebuke of the Parallax Brief’s argument. Although it was originally sent for approval for as a comment on the “About” page, the Parallax Brief believes it is too long for a comment, and well written and tightly argued enough for its own post. It is published in full and unedited. The author wishes to remain anonymous.

For those who are interested in getting the facts about American-Russian relations, and specifically defense-related issues, I just couldn’t resist writing a reply to the Parallax Brief post that was recently forwarded.

First of all, I offer the Parallax Brief author’s succinct statement seen on his website:

“I have no qualifications to write on these matters other than strong opinions; make no promises to be impartial, maintain objectivity or stick rigidly to the abovementioned topics; and I would love to incite some bare-knuckled debating.”

I personally could not have stated it better, and appreciate his honesty.  This statement is self-evident in what was written about the missile shield issue.

Second, as someone who does have experience not only in the field of American-Russian relations, but more specifically in the area of disarmament and nuclear missile force-posture, I believe that I can offer at least some objectivity to the debate.

Let me begin by stating that the author’s suggestion that Russia’s defense against a US first strike would somehow be undermined by the presence of a missile shield in Eastern Europe is patently absurd.  Russia’s ability to launch a counterstrike in such an unlikely event cannot be undermined by the existence of an ABM (Anti Ballistic Missile) system in one small country.  A US counter-force First strike would definitely incur a counter strike by surviving Russian forces.  The small-scale system they are contemplating for the Czechs cannot possibly provide even a low-grade defense for US missiles.  The reasons are simple: The US itself currently has no missiles in Eastern Europe, period.  And, US intermediate-range missiles have been eliminated from Western Europe as a result of the INF (Intermediate Nuclear Forces) treaty that was signed back in the 80s.

Such an ABM system as that planned for the Czech Republic provides zero force protection to US subs, bombers or ICBMs (Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles).  The only possible protection such a system can provide against Russian-launched weapons would be for the Czechs, the Poles and perhaps some of the other European countries, including former members of the Warsaw Pact.  If intermediate-range nuclear missiles have largely been scrapped from Europe, then what is so terribly wrong with the Europeans having something, however small, to protect Europe from a nuclear attack?  The European Union currently poses no threat to Russia’s defense, period.

And Russian missiles targeting US forces take the shortest possible trajectory, meaning across the Arctic Ocean, Bering Sea, from their own sub-based platforms and bomber forces.  Their trajectory does not pass through European air space.

The author talks of the undetectability of US stealth bombers as well as the short notice related to submarine-launched systems.  Those vulnerabilities are mutually shared by both powers, though the Russians do lack some of the involved technologies, while they do possess some technologies not currently in the US inventory.  However, Russian nuclear forces retain numerical superiority (something that was allowed for in both the INF and START Treaties to compensate for a perceived technology gap).

The ABM system proposed for the Czech Republic can cause only one potential irritation to the Russians:  The audacity of the US in placing a missile “shield” (an acknowledged misnomer) in the territory of one of Russia’s former allies (or should we say “proxy states?”).

Such a system poses no offensive threat, no assurance of the elimination of Russian nuclear strike capabilities in a first strike, and no threat against Russia’s ability to launch a counter strike in the highly unlikely event of a US first strike.

The points the Parallax author raises are moot.  My suggestion is that if someone does not have the objectivity nor the expertise to adequately address a topic, then the best thing that person can do is keep silent.  There is enough confusion in the world regarding such issues as it is.

Taleb’s heroes are empiricists, like David Hume and Karl Popper, who believed that only those things understood through experience can be accepted as real. But Taleb’s empiricism is that of an extreme skeptic, almost an anti-empirical empiricist. He believes that nothing can ever be ruled out — that random events cannot be understood through statistical distribution, even when one’s past experience suggests as much — and that the impossible occurs far more regularly than humans accept.

Taleb’s views are encapsulated by one of his favourite Hume quotations: “No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion.”

This makes Taleb extraordinarily relevant and important today.

This importance multiplied when Taleb crafted a book on what he, and John Stuart Mill and Hume before him, termed ‘black swan events’: — events written off as impossible but which actually occur, with disastrous consequences, far more frequently than is assumed — and had the good fortune (or prescience) to have it published on the eve of the credit crunch.

It turned Taleb the leftfield doomsayer into Taleb the celebrity soothsayer.

Taleb’s story is engaging and his theories intellectually fascinating, and both are detailed in an extraordinary Malcolm Gladwell New Yorker essay from a pre-crunch, pre-Black Swan theory 2002. Through the explanation of Taleb’s ideas, we learn of Victor Niederhoffer, a supposed genius stock trader who lost it all; why world renowned stock market players like George Soros and Warren Buffett might just be flat lucky; empiricism and its relevance today; and just what it is about the human mind that leaves our societies vulnerable to Black Swan events.

Highly recommended. (Click the link below.)

Blowing Up, Malcolm Gladwell, New Yorker, April 22nd and 29th, 2002

It came as a bit of a shock, then, to see the Parallax Brief get a big thumbs up from Siberian Light on Friday:

The Parallax Brief promises “unrepentant Subjectivity on Economics, Politics, Defence, Foreign Policy, and Russia”.  And, from what I can see, it delivers that subjectivity with style.

… as you might expect, there are a fair few posts covering the Russian economy. But it’s not just economics and foreign policy.  There are plenty of slice of life posts – for example, the wince-worthy tales of Mrs Parallax Brief’s trips to both a Moscow hospital and a Moscow Dentist.

Ego-boosting stuff, indeed.

Or the crushing disappointment giving a girlfriend a Christmas gift so breast-quiveringly romantic it could have won a place in Elizabeth I’s bed chamber, only to be handed a 10 pound Woolworths gift voucher in return.

From National Review Online:

“British prime minister Gordon Brown thought long and hard about what gift to bring on his visit to the White House last week. Barack Obama is the first African-American president, so the prime minister gave him an ornamental desk-pen holder hewn from the timbers of one of the Royal Navy’s anti-slaving ships of the 19th century, HMS Gannet. Even more appropriate, in 1909 the Gannet was renamed HMS President.

The president’s guest also presented him with the framed commission for HMS Resolute, the lost British ship retrieved from the Arctic and returned by America to London, and whose timbers were used for a thank-you gift Queen Victoria sent to Rutherford Hayes: the handsome desk that now sits in the Oval Office.

And, just to round things out, as a little stocking stuffer, Gordon Brown gave President Obama a first edition of Sir Martin Gilbert’s seven-volume biography of Winston Churchill.

In return, America’s head of state gave the prime minister 25 DVDs of “classic American movies.””

Nothing goes right for poor Gordon. Let’s just hope the Anglo-American special relationship lasts better than did the Parallax Brief’s own special relationship after the Woolworth’s voucher incident.