Новости за 01.09.2019

Over the last few days, I have been watching YouTube burn. Friends and colleagues have had their channels, large and small, deleted, many of them without warning or any pretense of fairness, rules, process, or appeal. It is Leftist corporate tyranny at its ugliest and least accountable.

An unintended effect of the 2014 "Maidan" revolution was Russia's swift annexation of Crimea. Western politicians and media were not pleased.

An important foreign story consistently underreported in the U.S. is the remarkable rise of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) in the eastern states of the Federal Republic. Regional elections will be held on September 1 in two of them, Brandenburg and Saxony. Angela Merkel’s “center-right” Christian Democratic Union (CSU) and her “center-left” coalition partners (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, SPD) will suffer unprecedented defeats in both.

​It is an age-old question as to the extent art reflects the world we live in. Bertolt Brecht allegedly said to the contrary that art was “not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it.” The Marxist German playwright devised theatrical methods designed to distance the audience from the staged drama while drawing self-reflexive attention to the contrived nature of the spectacle itself.

Want to roll like Putin? After a $190 million investment in R&D via a public-private partnership project called "Kortezh," Russia unveiled its first post-Soviet presidential limousine, the Aurus Senat, in a Moscow showroom on Friday, according to Reuters.