deathmtn

I also find the WatchOS clunky. The Dummies book that I was reading was several years old but nearly all the OS things have stayed the same. It’s sort of like the Apple TV, it seems like something that was a good idea, but doesn’t have a dedicated team of developers doing anything groundbreaking with it anymore.

As John Dunlop points out in The Moscow Bombings of September 1999, the attacks were the equivalent for Russians of September 11, 2001, for Americans. They aroused a fear of terrorism—along with a desire for revenge against the Chechens—that Russians had not known since Stalin used the supposed terrorist threat as a pretext to launch his bloody purges of the 1930s. Yet unlike in the American case, Russian authorities have stonewalled all efforts to investigate who was behind these acts of terror and why they happened. In the words of Russian journalist Yuliya Kalinina: “The Americans several months after 11 September 2001 already knew everything—who the terrorists were and where they come from…. We in general know nothing.”

Dunlop, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, seeks in his book to provide the “spade work” for an official Russian inquiry, if it ever were to be initiated (a highly doubtful proposition as long as Putin remains in power). He draws on investigative reporting by Russian journalists, accounts of Russian officials in law enforcement agencies, eyewitness testimony, and the analyses of Western journalists and academics. The evidence he provides makes an overwhelming case that Russian authorities were complicit in these horrific attacks.

…

As it turned out, there was no need to cancel the elections, because the Russian people rallied around Putin and his vows to seek revenge against ethnic Chechens. Russian troops began invading Chechnya on October 1. His approval ratings soared: from 31 percent in mid-August to 78 percent in November. As Dunlop notes: “The continuing upward movement in Putin’s rating was accompanied by an increase in the hatred, which soon became incandescent, on the part of ethnic Russians for Chechens.”

The evidence provided in The Moscow Bombings makes it abundantly clear that the FSB of the Russian Republic, headed by Patrushev, was responsible for carrying out the attacks. But who ordered them from on high? Dunlop concludes that it was most likely the three members of Yeltsin’s “inner circle”: Aleksandr Voloshin, Valentin Yumashev, and Yeltsin’s daughter Tatyana, who were the closest to Yeltsin.

Her grandparents were these gorgeously weird people, with their own peculiar and rambling sense of humor. And they built their sense of humor into their house. There were secret doors, hidden rooms. I remember, after we'd spent a full day camped out in their guest room, my spouse opened up one of the closet doors to reveal a secret entrance to a tunnel, which led to a hidden craft room.

Her grandparents had also carefully and lovingly built, in their modest suburban backyard, this extraordinarily dense garden. They'd spent years tuning the mix of trees and shrubs and vegetable beds into ecological harmony, where all the plants worked together. Tall trees would shade short bushes; short bushes would keep down ero-sion; one plant would take nitrogen from the soil and another would put nitrogen back in. Their garden yielded a shocking amount of delicious food from that little space. The term for this kind of thing, among a certain sect of hardcore gardeners, is a "food forest" - a concentrated and interconnected web of highly diverse plants, supporting each other like a natural ecosystem.

When her grandparents died, I went with my spouse to clean that house and pack up a few mementos that she wanted to keep. And then, because nobody in the family still lived in San Diego, they decided to sell it to some house flippers.

The flippers took the house apart. They removed all the weird old stuff. They took out her grandfather's handmade bookcases and replaced them with Ikea furniture. They removed all the secret doors and hidden tunnels. And they leveled the food forest, cutting down all the trees and shrubs and networks of vegetables, and replaced it with concrete and an ordinary grass lawn.

You might think there's an easy, neutral way to compare the values of things: Just put them on the market and see what price they bring. But that method is not neutral. It tends to prefer things with highly accessible value. And when we use that method intensively, we'll start to see the world only in terms of those easy values.