The following video is puzzling and disturbing.

The description of the video on YouTube says:

This presenter was one of several consultants flown in from California and the United Kingdom for the Chicago Public Schools’ Office of Strategic School Support Services’ special network. This is a professional development for teachers of Saturday ISAT preparation classes.

This sad mockery of the very concept of professional training is delivered by some brainless robot who obviously doesn’t know the first thing about teaching. This better not be paid for by the taxpayers of the state of Illinois of whom I am one.

It is beyond offensive that a state is going broke while pompous fools are being flown in from all over the world to peddle their useless garbage. And what exactly is “Chicago Public Schools’ Office of Strategic School Support Services”? Do my taxes also pay for the salaries and the offices of all those time-wasters who do nothing but degrade teachers?

N and I started watching House of Cards to distract ourselves from the tragic situation involving our respective countries.

It’s a good show but I’m not sure if we’ll continue watching me. N finds the domineering wife played by the talented Robin Wright to be so scary that he started having nightmares. I’m, of course, the exact opposite type of wife but N was born in the USSR, so he has many traumatic memories of this sort of woman.

Kevin Spacey’s tortured attempt at a South Carolinian accent is one thing I dislike about the show. Also, the hobbit-like creature cast in the part of the young reporter is annoying. But the show is good.

I was expecting the weather to be much more spring-like by this point in the challenge. But the snow is still thick on the ground, and we need to adapt to that. Let’s suspend the spring-time activities for a while and do something that is never a bad idea:

BREATHE IN THE SPRING

Twice a day this week we will be doing breathing exercises. Each session lasts ten minutes. It’s best to let some fresh air in when you are doing the activity. It is crucial not to remain sitting down, especially if you sit behind a desk.

Breathe in as deep and slow as you can. Close your eyes and concentrate on the breathing. Listen to the flow of air and let it drown out all anxious thoughts and feelings.

After each session, drink some water.

This is a small and easy activity but it can make a really important change in a person’s overall sense of well-being.

German chancellor Angela Merkel has reportedly told Barack Obama that after talking to Vladimir Putin she was unsure whether the Russian president was “in touch with reality”. . .

The New York Times reports that in a phone call with the US president, Merkel said that Putin was living “in another world”.

Merkel sounds quite surprised here but I don’t know why she should be. Putin and absolutely everybody else holding political and economic power in Russia today is a remnant of the Soviet era. He has been listening to, absorbing, and finally producing and again absorbing an endless stream of propaganda that offers a certain worldview. He had no reason to question this worldview ever in his life because it gave him a more than comfortable existence and surrounded him with a bunch of terrified sycophants. And now the sycophants are repeating the same old Soviet-style propaganda to him.

How many times did I say on this blog that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a sham, a pretense? There was no transfer of power, be it political or economic, after 1991. The same people remained in power. They practiced the same approaches and uttered the same words.

How many times did I say that it is meaningless to speak about the end of the Cold War if, for one of the sides in this war, it hasn’t ended? I force myself to watch the Russian newscasts on a regular basis, and I’m telling you, the rhetoric of the Cold War is as strong  as ever. I was lucky to grow up in the late 1980s and 1990s when there was a brief respite in the FSU media from the constant US-bashing and the saccharine odes to the ultra-patriarchal and deeply nationalistic values of the “mysterious Russian soul.” Even then, when I moved to Canada, I brought some of this exceptionalist, anti-Western worldview with me.

John Kerry made some pretty harsh statements about Russia’s invasion of the Crimea:

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on Sunday condemned Russia’s “incredible act of aggression” in Ukraine and threatened economic sanctions by the United States and allies to isolate Moscow, but called for a peaceful resolution to the crisis.

“You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped up pre-text,” Kerry told the CBS program “Face the Nation.”

Of course, the most powerful Russian news agency ITAR-TASS translated the statement in a way that makes it sound that the Obama administration understands and respects the Russia’s need to invade. (You can find the Russian information here.)

This means that Putin is choosing not to listen to anything the US might have to say on the subject of its imperialist aggression.

However, there is a glimmer of hope. A new player has appeared on the arena, and that player just might manage to convince Putin to rethink his goals in Ukraine.

This player is the market.

On Monday morning, the Moscow stock exchange plunged about 11%. The rouble plummeted to historical lows. The shares of the oil and gas corporation that owns the state (Gasprom) as well as the state bank Sberbank and the VTB bank lost between 15% and 18% of their value.

Russian economy is completely dependent on its natural resources. In the years that passed since 1991, no efforts were made to weaken this notoriously unhealthy economic model where a country doesn’t produce anything and simply lives off the proceeds from selling its (finite) natural resource:

While Russia’s biggest export is the supply of oil and gas, it imports the vast majority of its goods and experts said the combination of higher interest rates and a weak ruble would push up inflation – making life tougher for Russian consumers.

Daniel McCormack, strategist with Macquarie, said of the reaction by investors: “Clearly the market is in a risk-off mode on the back of the geopolitical developments, the most concerning for Europe since the end of the cold war.

Now Russia has finally met a force willing to castigate its corrupt owners for destabilizing the situation in Europe. Putin and his cronies are so infected with the Soviet mentality that it never occurs to them to think about the economic consequences of their actions. But if the international law means nothing to them, maybe the logic of the market will persuade them to reconsider their imperialist activities.

This is the first glimmer of hope I’ve had about the situation in Ukraine for weeks. Now if the US just nudges the market a little bit by placing a few economic sanctions on Russia, Ukraine might have a hope of not losing any more of its territory than the Crimea.

Wow, Johns Hopkins U wants to offer its graduate students $30,000 per year + medical insurance + obviously, full tuition + $1,000 per year in travel money. Fewer students will be admitted but the ones who do will get these phenomenal work conditions. In order to make up for the lost labor of graduate TAs, tenured profs will be encouraged to teach more undergard courses.

Can you guess who is protesting against this plan for a dramatic increase in grad student funding and a better access of undergrads to actual professors?

Putin pursues several goals with his invasion of Ukraine. Showing the Americans how little he cares what they think is always personally gratifying and politically useful. Distracting the people of Russia from the plummeting value of the rouble is also an important goal.

And there is something else. In his efforts to preserve the Federation intact, Putin has alienated the Russian extreme nationalists (or neo-Nazis). The neo-Nazis hated Putin for pandering to the Chechens, for paying trillions of roubles to Chechnya and Dagestan so that they don’t try to leave the federation, for refusing to require entrance visas from non-Slavic neighboring republics, for permitting a huge non-Slavic immigration into Russia, for punishing xenophobic statements that endanger the Federation with a prison term.

However, in these last few weeks, the neo-Nazis have developed a guarded warmth in their discussions of Putin’s most recent actions. The official discourse about Ukraine that is coming out of Kremlin has every ingredient to gladden the heart of a neo-Nazi.

During the Spanish Civil War, the only way each side could make itself kill fellow Spaniards was by convincing that there were no Spaniards on the other side. The Republicans knew they were fighting Hitler’s Nazis and Mussolini’s Fascists, and the Nationals convinced themselves that there were only Soviet Marxists and Judeo-Masonic conspirators on the opposite side. This way of thinking made it easy to shoot at your brother, sister, neighbor, friend because you imagined them as evil strangers.

In a similar way, the Russians who are cheering the invasion of Ukraine have convinced themselves that they are not endorsing the killing of Ukrainians. It’s easier for them to believe that the only people in Ukraine who do not welcome the Russian invasion are neo-Nazis in the American pay. And when you say “a US Nazi”, you create an expression that brings together the two things a Russian speaker is trained from birth to detest and despise the most. It is so much easier to shoot at a Ukrainian when you have imaged that he is “an American Nazi.”

Obama is holding lengthy phone conversations with Putin, explaining to the Russian president that his invasion of Ukraine violates international law.

These conversations are a royal waste of time. Putin couldn’t care less about international law. To him, Russia us exceptional, it is the new future world leader that exists on a different plane from tiresome international accords and laws.

Obama’s international advisors are not very educated because he routinely addresses Putin in terms that are not likely to work.

If you know me at all, you must realize that I’m not a hysteric who screams “Fascists! Nazis! The Holocaust! The Apocalypse!” whenever anybody displeases me. I don’t take these terms lightly. But I read more and more articles suggesting that the regime in power in Russia right now is a fascist one, and I’m failing to find arguments against this point of view. Putin’s government is accusing everybody it dislikes or finds inconvenient of fascism, and we all know what such an obsessive use of a single term betrays.

Here is a list of 14 defining characteristics of fascism, applied to Russia:

1. Powerful and Continuing Nationalism – Fascist regimes tend to make constant use of patriotic mottos, slogans, symbols, songs, and other paraphernalia. Flags are seen everywhere, as are flag symbols on clothing and in public displays.

 Putin has inundated every public space and every means of mass communication with jingoist slogans, flags, and intense exhibitions of nationalistic pride.

2. Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights – Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of “need.” The people tend to look the other way or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarcerations of prisoners, etc.

 Thank God, there has been no torture, executions or assassinations yet. However, people are being arrested and held for lengthy periods of time in Russia on trumped up charges all the time. The concept of human rights is quite alien to people in the FSU countries, and a lot of time will be needed for it to gain currency.

3. Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause – The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial , ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists; socialists, terrorists, etc.

 The enemies that are used to whip up everybody into a frenzy of patriotic sentiment are the evil Americans, the fascists, and, at this particular point in time, Ukrainians.

4. Supremacy of the Military – Even when there are widespread domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized.

Yes, Putin has made enormous efforts and invested ridiculous amounts of money into restoring some of the prestige of the Russian Army.

5. Rampant Sexism – The governments of fascist nations tend to be almost exclusively male-dominated. Under fascist regimes, traditional gender roles are made more rigid. Divorce, abortion and homosexuality are suppressed and the state is represented as the ultimate guardian of the family institution.

 Oh yes. The rights of women, the rights of everybody to organize their own personal and sexual lives, the rights of sexual minorities are all under a vicious assault from the state in Russia.

6. Controlled Mass Media – Sometimes to media is directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media is indirectly controlled by government regulation, or sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship, especially in war time, is very common.

As I told you recently, in Russia there was one TV channel that kind of didn’t completely belong to the government and allowed itself to put on air some mildly rebellious commentary. Now it has been shut down. The journalists who didn’t want to write pro-Putin articles were all fired from their newspapers.

7. Obsession with National Security – Fear is used as a motivational tool by the government over the masses.

 Yes, the feelings of being a beleaguered, constantly unappreciated, wronged nation in constant danger of assault from evil foreigners are being tirelessly cultivated. In case you didn’t know, the official Russian explanation of the popular revolution in Ukraine that removed the corrupt Ukrainian president from power is that there wasn’t any revolution. All of the people who protested in the streets were hired by the American secret services to damage Russia. Today, the Russian Parliament discussed the need to invade Ukraine in order to resist Americans. If this isn’t an absolutely insane paranoid fantasy, then I don’t know what is.

8. Religion and Government are Intertwined – Governments in fascist nations tend to use the most common religion in the nation as a tool to manipulate public opinion. Religious rhetoric and terminology is common from government leaders, even when the major tenets of the religion are diametrically opposed to the government’s policies or actions.

 So true. Even though less than 2% of Russians actually practice Orthodox Christianity, Putin has long forgotten that the Constitution of the Russian Federation defines it as a secular state. The Russian Orthodox has enormous privileges from the state and is, to be honest, completely out of control. Church leaders are mired in a veritable orgy of drunken, cynical debauchery and consumerism.

9. Corporate Power is Protected – The industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist nation often are the ones who put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite.

 Well, this is the definition of Putin’s regime. The oligarchs and the administration are indissolubly linked in one bloody knot of criminality.

10. Labor Power is Suppressed – Because the organizing power of labor is the only real threat to a fascist government, labor unions are either eliminated entirely, or are severely suppressed.

 After the tragic Soviet history, the very words “a labor union” make an FSU person shudder. So there is no power of labor in Russia.

11. Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts – Fascist nations tend to promote and tolerate open hostility to higher education, and academia. It is not uncommon for professors and other academics to be censored or even arrested. Free expression in the arts and letters is openly attacked.

 There was one academic who tried to defend science and oppose the introduction of the Christian dogma into his physics classes. The last I heard, he had to leave his job. The problem is that there aren’t any professors, academics, arts or letters in Russia right now. There are a few bloggers who are criticizing the regime. One is on house arrest. One left the country. A few more are facing charges for extremism, which means they wrote something Putin didn’t appreciate on their blogs.

12. Obsession with Crime and Punishment – Under fascist regimes, the police are given almost limitless power to enforce laws. The people are often willing to overlook police abuses and even forego civil liberties in the name of patriotism. There is often a national police force with virtually unlimited power in fascist nations.

 Absolutely true. Many people in Moscow are on trial right now for “resisting police” during street protests. Even in cases where video footage clearly shows that these “terrorists and extremists” did exactly what the police told them and never resisted, they are still charged and sentenced to jail.

13. Rampant Cronyism and Corruption – Fascist regimes almost always are governed by groups of friends and associates who appoint each other to government positions and use governmental power and authority to protect their friends from accountability. It is not uncommon in fascist regimes for national resources and even treasures to be appropriated or even outright stolen by government leaders.

 Oh God, so true. That is exactly what Putin’s regime is. A group of cronies who are robbing the country and using jingoistic slogans to ensure that citizens don’t protest.

14. Fraudulent Elections – Sometimes elections in fascist nations are a complete sham. Other times elections are manipulated by smear campaigns against or even assassination of opposition candidates, use of legislation to control voting numbers or political district boundaries, and manipulation of the media. Fascist nations also typically use their judiciaries to manipulate or control elections.

If you were following the news in 2011-12, you must already know that the elections in Russia were falsified in the most blatant and shameless manner and in spite of the mountains of proof of electoral fraud, nothing ever came of the attempts of some people in Russia to protest.

The Russian Federation is an enormous country with huge resources and an immense nuclear arsenal. Of course, we all know that countries that have oil and gas can afford to do absolutely anything they want. But a fascist Russia is a terrifying thing to contemplate.