John Brown's Notes and Essays

by: Nicole Goodkind, CNN Business Posted:  Mar 26, 2022 / 06:26 PM EST  / Updated:  Mar 26, 2022 / 11:01 PM EST image (not from article) from (CNN) — Former Federal Reserve head Alan Greenspan has a keen interest in men’s underwear. Not because he’s preoccupied with the evolving fashions of nether garments — rather, he sees underwear sales as a key economic predictor. Sounds weird, right? But it’s just one of the many strange ways experts try to predict booms  and busts . “He once told me that … the garment that is most private is male underpants, because nobody sees it except people in the locker room, and who cares?” longtime NPR correspondent Robert Krulwich  said of Greenspan  years ago. Those sales are usually stable, “so on those few occasions where it dips, that means that men are so pinched that they are deciding not to replace underpants.” The men’s underwear index (yes, it exists) backs up Greenspan’s theory: US sales of men’s underwear fell signi...

March 31, 2022, 8:17 a.m. ET March 31, 2022 March 31, 2022 Ivan Nechepurenko ,  The New York Times   Image (not from article) from   President Vladimir V. Putin’s approval ratings have reached levels unseen in years, according to an independent   poll   released on Thursday, as many Russians rally around the flag in the face of mounting international pressure.   Eighty-three percent of Russians said they approved of Mr. Putin’s actions, up from 69 percent in January, according to a poll by the Levada Center, an independent pollster in Moscow. Ratings of many other government institutions, as well as the governing party, have also gone up, the poll indicated.   Some observers believe polls in Russia do not reflect public opinion accurately, with many people giving answers they believe are socially acceptable, but they are widely considered useful tools in gauging the dynamics of people’s moods. Many Russians live in a world, as presented by state-run me...

Or perhaps it's a clash of civilizations Matthew Yglesias ,  Mar 30, Slow Boring via Prof PS Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History and the Last Man” and Samuel Huntington’s “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order” annoyed seemingly everyone when they came out in the early ‘90s. And yet, something about their core arguments was compelling enough that people still reference them both decades later. I’ve been thinking about these books in the context of the war in Ukraine and the varied responses from countries around the world. The scale of the mobilization against Russia certainly has a “history is back” flavor. Fukuyama fans maintained throughout the Global War on Terror that his book never argued that historical events would stop occurring, but it did argue that a certain flavor of big picture ideological contestation was a thing of the past. And while the volume of sanctioning against Russia is certainly a big deal, it is meaningfully contested. Russia h...

image (not from article) from By Bret Stephens, Opinion Columnist, The New York Times (March 29, 2022) ;  see also  The conventional wisdom is that Vladimir Putin catastrophically miscalculated.  He thought Russian-speaking Ukrainians would welcome his troops. They didn’t. He thought he’d swiftly depose Volodymyr Zelensky’s government. He hasn’t. He thought he’d divide NATO. He’s united it. He thought he had sanction-proofed his economy. He’s wrecked it. He thought the Chinese would help him out. They’re   hedging their bets . He thought his modernized military would make mincemeat of Ukrainian forces. The Ukrainians are making mincemeat of his, at least on some fronts.  Putin’s miscalculations raise questions about his strategic judgment and mental state. Who, if anyone, is advising him? Has he lost contact with reality? Is he physically unwell? Mentally?   Condoleezza Rice warns : “He’s not in control of his emotions. Something is wrong.” Russia’s s...