There's a very interesting article on euobserver.com about Russia's attempts to re-brand itself as a benign global power in the eyes of Brussels.  The piece reports that news agency Ria-Novosti has apparently engaged the services of low-profile PR consultancy RJI Companies to assist it in softening Russia's image in Europe, in order to justify it having a large say in global affairs.  Apparently a sub-section of this campaign revolves around Stalin rehabilitation and a Soviet makeover:Russian news agency Ria Novosti is rolling out a new public relations campaign in the political capital of the European Union which, according to sources in the PR industry, aims to justify Russia's great power ambitions and improve the image of Joseph Stalin....

Following the publishing of President Dmitry Medvedev's extended liberal thought piece, which at least one commentator said may as well have been penned by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the Kremlin convened a conference yesterday in Yaroslavl entitled "The Modern State and Global Security."According to the Reuters report, attendees from the state-approved opposition (Zhirinovsky can come, but Nemtsov can forget about it) spent the time discussing the social compassion of Joseph Stalin, berating American democracy, while a visiting Chinese scholar denounced the evils of separatism (hard to know if this was a shot at Russia's conduct in Georgia).  Even with the Prime Minister of Spain in attendence, the sideshows attracted the most attention.  The salient message to take home ...

Angela Merkel is about as gracious as they come.  During the Danzig Summit, there seemed no crime of WWII that she was unwilling to accept responsibility for:  "I pay tribute to the 60m people who lost their lives in this war unleashed by Germany."Merkel's encompassing and compassionate speech was important and underrated, perhaps even taken for granted given the tidy (and deserved) historical dustbin that the Third Reich has been consigned to.  Vladimir Putin, though his comments to Gazeta Wyborcza were commendably open, did not see any reason to go quite so far to denounce the conduct of Joseph Stalin, as he doesn't believe that the Russian leader should occupy that same category as Hitler in our collective ...

Poor Joseph Stalin.  Sure, he personally signed orders to kill hundreds of thousands, but why can't the media leave the poor guy alone?  Efforts in Russia to rejuvenate his image have been creative...  We had the RussiaToday advertisements talking about his poetry writing, they made a special cell phone theme bearing his likeness, his family members are even suing newspapers.As the anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact approaches, the Stalin defenders have gone overboard.  It now appears that his arrangement with the Germans - that little piece of history which makes Poland so angry - was A-OK.From Voice of America:On August 17, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service issued a statement saying it had declassified documents showing that the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was the Soviet Union's "only available means of self-defense." ...

The first thing I do when I sit down at my desk in the morning is check the price of gold. The second thing I do is check the price of oil.  Sure, the price for gold and oil changes all the time. Prices go up and down, for good and bad reasons. Heck, sometimes prices fluctuate and the reasoning defies logic.

Still, I watch the price points. Deep down, I’m looking to see if the prices for gold and oil are following my long-term view of what ought to happen. That is, my long-term view is that both gold and oil prices are going to rise to astonishing heights.

Scarcity rules. That’s the foundation of my investment thesis. Today, I’ll explain my thinking about gold and leave oil for another time.

Reviewing the Gold Landscape

The first thing to understand, as an old geology professor at Harvard once told me, is that

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Ambitious Soviet architecture plans are a real favorite of mine.  Right up there next to the planned-but-never-built Palace of the Soviets is the work of Vladimir Tatlin, an architect whose tremendous Monument to the Third International also never made it past the modeling stage.  The sheer, Stakhanovite scope of imagination is something to reckon with though.  A new book has been published about Tatlin's work, reviewed over here by Catherine Merridale.  Interesting stuff.

Tatlin's tower, more accurately known as the Monument to the Third International, remains his most famous creation. It was commissioned in 1919 as a monument to the Bolshevik Revolution, which had taken place just two years before. As Lynton observes only in passing, the entire project was undertaken

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Earlier today there were reports that Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has ordered the immediate formation of a government commission empowered to fight back against "false history."  It remains unclear exactly what these powers may include - it could be a reinvention of the Soviet GLAVLIT censorship bureau, or something much more mildly rhetorical - but in terms of linguistics, the high ground has been seized.  So swiftly a topic as vast as history, how it is taught, portrayed in media, or even remembered, has been placed into an unnatural dichotomy.  It is either "true" (what the Kremlin says), or "false" (which is anything the state chooses to disagree with).The formation of this history commission was preceded by Medvedev's comments in a May 7 video blog post coinciding with the Victory Day parades in Moscow: ...

On Thursday, Oct. 30, the Russian human rights group Memorial held a ceremony in front of the former KGB offices on Lubyanskaya Ploshchad to commemorate the Day of Victims of Political Repressions, reading off a list of about 30,000 victims of Joseph Stalin's purges (this number only represents victims from Moscow in just 1938). Just a day earlier, the Canadian government stripped Helmut Oberlander of his citizenship, preparing to deport the 84-year-old alleged Nazi war criminal for his participation in mobile death squads. Last week, the intrepid Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon announced an investigation into the murders of more than 100,000 people by the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco. Throughout the month of October at the International Criminal Court in the Hague, a historic war crimes trial against the Congolese militia leader Thomas Lubanga stopped ...

VANCOUVER, B.C. - The U.S. financial crisis has cut so deep - and the government has taken on so much debt in misguided attempts to bail out such companies as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac - that even larger financial shocks are still to come, global investing guru Jim Rogers said in an exclusive interview with Money Morning. Indeed, the U.S. financial debacle is now so ingrained - and a so-called "Super Crash" so likely - that most Americans alive today won’t be around by the time the last of this credit-market mess is finally cleared away - if it ever is, Rogers said. The end of this crisis "is a long way away," Rogers said. "In fact, it may not be in our lifetimes." During a 40-minute interview during a wealth-management conference in this West Coast Canadian city last month, Rogers also said:...

Alex’s Notes: Dont know about you, but I consider Jim Rogers to be a very smart man. You dont become a Billionaire in commodities by being stupid. He has some very interesting things to say about the Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke in a recent interview.

In my opinion, this guy gets inflation and the big picture better than just about anyone.

8.19.2008 Latest Jim Rogers Interview,

During a 40-minute interview during a wealth-management conference in this West Coast Canadian city last month, Rogers said that:

• U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke should “resign” for the bailout deals he’s handed out as he’s tried to battle this credit crisis. • That the U.S. national debt – the roughly $5 trillion held by the public– essentially doubled in the course of a single weekend because of the Fed-led credit crisis bailout deals. • That U.S. consumers and investors can expect much-higher interest rates

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