Photo, left: In far northwestern Russia is an ancient land named Karelia.  Therein is Lake Onega, along which are constructed many wooden churches from the Seventeenth Century and later, all from wood and all with elegant joinery so that not one nail is used. The Church of the Transfiguration (q.v.:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kizhi_Pogost) is considered an apex of this craft.  
Traditional Russian and Siberian wooden buildings are surprisingly sturdy s0 they last for centuries in the harshest weather, yet are adorned with delicate, hand-carved wooden lacework (“Also see how the shadow repeats the wooden carvings. This is an old Russian Solar sign called Kolovrat - sort of an ancient Russian solar swastika.“). These are architectural cousins of stave churches, the Medieval wooden Christian church buildings once common in northwestern Europe, with a few still found in Norway. The splendid early Russian religious structures in Karelia are a source of deep pride for many Russians.
1) “All Russian Orthodox Patriarchs are KGB colonels.” -- Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov
2) "The installation of Kirill I as the new patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church last month will not end the subordination of the church to the Putin regime. On the contrary, the church is likely to emerge as an even stronger supporter of dictatorship and anti-Western ideology.
"Kirill, who was the Metropolitan of Smolensk, succeeds Alexei II who died in December after 18 years as head of the Russian Church. According to material from the Soviet archives, Kirill was a KGB agent (as was Alexei). This means he was more than just an informer, of whom there were millions in the Soviet Union. He was an active officer of the organization. Neither Kirill nor Alexei ever acknowledged or apologized for his ties with the security agencies."  –Forbes.com
3) "After the Bolshevik Revolution, the Communist government savagely persecuted the Orthodox Church, killings many thousands of clergy and monastics, and closing the vast majority of churches and monasteries. When Communism fell, the church returned to visibility, and the last quarter-century has witnessed a startling and many-sided revival. Places of worship have been rebuilt, monasteries flourish again, and pilgrimage shrines have begun a new era of mass popularity. The post-Soviet religious restoration was supervised by the then-Patriarch Alexy II (1990-2008) and by his successor, Kirill.
'In exchange for so many blessings, the church has of course given fervent support to the Putin government, lavishly praising it and providing ideological justifications for a strong government at home, and expansion beyond its borders. But such enthusiasm goes far beyond mere payback. Support for authoritarian regimes is deeply embedded in Orthodox political thought, and Russian Orthodoxy in particular has always been tinged with mystical and millenarian nationalism.
"When Kirill presents Orthodox Russia as a bastion of true faith, besieged by the false values and immorality of a secularized West, his words are deeply appreciated by both the state and the church. The apocalyptic character of that conflict is made evident by the West’s embrace of same-sex marriage. As so often in past centuries, Holy Russia confronts a Godless and decadent West. It is Putin, not Kirill, who has warned that 'Many Euro-Atlantic countries have moved away from their roots, including Christian values. Policies are being pursued that place on the same level a multi-child family and a same-sex partnership, a faith in God and a belief in Satan.'
"We should not see Kirill as a rogue cleric abandoning the interests of his church to seek political favors: he really believes every word. Whether Putin and his circle literally believe the religious rhetoric is not relevant: they act as if they do. The solidly Orthodox framing of Russian nationalism also ensures that powerful Rightist groups happily rally around Putin and his not-so-ex-KGB clique."   –http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/putins-corrupted-orthodoxy/
 
JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW
Co-host: Larry Kudlow, CNBC senior advisor; & Cumulus Media radio
 
Hour One
Tuesday  16 February 2016   / Hour 1, Block A:  Richard A Epstein – Hoover; James Parker Hall Distinguished Svc Prof of Law, University of Chicago Law School;  Chicago Law, NUY Law, in re: Antonin Gregory Scalia, in an interlude between fascinating jobs, interviewed at Chicago; Richard was present and can still recall the presentation – his boundless energy, his  mastery of controlled hyperbole. Nino was sui generis.
Tuesday  16 February 2016   / Hour 1, Block B:    Richard A Epstein, Hoover, Chicago Law, NUY Law, in re: Antonin Gregory Scalia – invited to work on the DC Court; then invited by Pres Reagan to become a Supreme Court Justice.  LK: “Wouldn't it be better just to have the president nominate a candidate to the Court to replace Justice Scalia, then have the Senate accept or reject?”  RAE: GOP fear that someone will make a favorable impression and a Senator make an error, then have a nominee unsuitable for the GOP to become confirmed. LK: Scalia always called himself an Originalist.  RAE:  Easier to say what it isn’t. A lot was dvpd by Nino in opposition to his freewheeling predecessors, esp Griswald in Connecticut.   Worried about misguided judicial intervention or innovation, where the US Left follows judicial restraints when they like it and not when they don’t.  Then that [relatively modest case] morphed into a discussion of abortion. “Originalism” = don't deviate from the text – but it's not clear what's what. Start by reading the words carefully a, figure out where you start the text and how you read it. Commerce – in opposition to mfrg, mining, etc; but Supreme Court expanded the scope of federal power a hundredfold from what it had been.   . . .
Tuesday  16 February 2016   / Hour 1, Block C: Richard A Epstein, Hoover, Chicago Law, NUY Law, in re: Antonin Gregory Scalia. [About how Scalia reached a DC court; Policy Review (from AEI) - Joe Ball, Bork, Epstein, and Scalia. . . . Heritage actually invited me to speak; ‘twas a brawl with a fellow named Michael Horowitz; as I took the train home, I thought, “This is my last foray into politics.”]  I come as a Roman lawyer — nontextual elements entered into  . . .  My book, Takings – if it's correct, every aspect of the New Deal is unconstitutional.   . . .  Eminent domain: 1) outright taking of physical land for private gain – Mrs [Vera] Coking, parking lot for Trump’s casino: was unlikely to go for a public use.  2) Much larger: the whole scope of regulation – by the time you hit the New Deal, huge expansion of federal . . . I put myself out on a limb and proceeded to hack it off. Some book reviews were excoriating but the book survives.  All of Scalia’s originalism did not lead to judicial restraint.  . . . However you slice and dice the elements, you never come out with the Warren Court again.  “The Virtues of the Frying Pan,” lecture by Antonin Scalia. The question is: when you accede to democratic institutions and when you [reject] them.  . . . Robert Bork also was brilliant and erratic, held every important position you could think of. 
Tuesday  16 February 2016   / Hour 1, Block D:  Richard A Epstein, Hoover, Chicago Law, NUY Law, in re: Antonin Gregory Scalia. The partisan fight that followed the 98-0 confirmation of Scalia to the Supreme Court.  . . . If Voltaire had written this play, it’d be laughed at. Joe Biden was the man who drove the Bork fiasco? No, it was the work before the Committee met; Kennedy: “In Robert Bork’s America . . .”  (as in, “In Adolf Hitler’s Germany. . . “).  In 1991: the Clarence Thomas hearings.  No Anita Hall in the beginning; fury that a Black African would take a GOP Court seat; attack him on natural law grounds; Lawrence Tribe pretended he was expert in the matter – Sen Biden pulled out a copy of my book . . . an economic illiterate!  Thomas: You know, the words “private property “ do exist in the Constitution. “A high-tech lynching.” . . .  Anita Hill drove all this off the front page and I fell into the dust of history.  . . . Ruth Ginsburg and Steve Breyer were relatively uncontroversial.   . . . Scalia was amazingly generous. The way you can tell a man is great is if his clerks like him—and Scalia’s clerks loved him   
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Nino Scalia’s legacy, by John R. Bolton  
Antonin “Nino” Scalia will rank as one of America’s greatest jurists, not only for his decades of service as an Associate Justice on the Supreme Court, as a judge on the US Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, and as an Assistant Attorney General at the Justice Department, but for his legal scholarship as well. As a professor at several prestigious law schools and as a visiting Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Scalia had, and will continue to have, an enormous influence in American legal thinking.
For decades after the judicial revolution of the 1930s, conservatives were at sea in knowing how to respond to the Supreme Court’s seemingly limitless willingness to decide questions well beyond its historical — and constitutional —  remit. What the Yale Law professor Alexander Bickel had once labeled “the least dangerous branch” was wreaking itself upon the country, doing untold damage to the very concept of representative government.
Before the Roosevelt Court, there had been no pressing need to articulate a philosophy of judging because the implicit understanding of the Constitution, and the judiciary’s limited role, had been so widely shared. Once that tacit, implied consensus disappeared, however, there was nothing immediately at hand to replace it and provide bulwarks against the new judicial activism from the Left. Accordingly, for a considerable period, conservatives failed to check the spreading chaos because they could not reformulate a philosophy of judging that constrained what was increasingly becoming the federal government’s third political branch.
Various approaches were tried and failed. “Judicial restraint” proved inadequate, as did “strict constructionism.” Neither approach afforded a systematic, principled approach for the judiciary, smacking instead of being attitudes rather than philosophies.
Then came Scalia and other important scholars who developed what we now know as “originalism,” the concept that, for constitutional adjudication in particular, judges must strive to find what the drafters and ratifiers of disputed constitutional provisions actually meant. It was that understanding that they had sought to embody in the law, and it was that understanding that bound those who came after.
Originalism’s central tenet was that the only acceptable meaning of constitutional provisions was what the nation’s political bodies adopted at the time. Later efforts by creative judges, politicians, and (worst of all) academics to imagine new meanings for the words before them were subject to no limitation except that of the human imagination. These were unhinged from the basic political decisions of the institutions of representative government that had adopted the Constitutional text in question. Once untethered, it was truly the judges who ruled and not the people.
The unlearnèd political commentariat insists still on calling Scalia’s judicial philosophy “conservative,” although it is no such thing. Originalist analysis can lead to judicial activism in eradicating mistakes by prior courts which incorrectly interpreted the Constitution. As Scalia and others argued, stare decisis is not a powerful analytical tool in constitutional law, since only the judiciary can correct mistakes made in earlier judicial decisions, unlike cases involving statutory construction, which Congress and the Executive can correct without judicial involvement.
This existential struggle is far from over, and only underlines why the nomination and confirmation of Scalia’s successor are so important. He would relish the fight.
In September 1986, when Scalia was confirmed, I was Assistant AG for Legislative Affairs, and was deeply involved in his and William Rehnquist’s nominations. Scalia was confirmed 98-0 in an unusual evening vote, shortly after Rehnquist’s far more contentious nomination to be Chief Justice was approved. By prior arrangement, from an office just off the Senate floor, I called Nino to tell him the outcome. He was attending a dinner being held in the massive banquet facility of the Capital Hilton Hotel. In those days before cell phones, I had the number of the kitchen manager, and a waiter went out to Scalia’s table to bring him back to the manager’s office so we could speak. I congratulated the new Justice-to-be, and said that vote had been 98-0. There was silence at the other end of the line, and then he asked quietly, “who were the two who didn’t vote?” I explained that both Barry Goldwater and Jake Garn were absent because of health issues, both also having missed the Rehnquist vote. Nino broke out laughing at the irony that two of the most conservative senators had not voted for him.
It won’t be so lopsided this time. But if Scalia were reincarnated as the nominee for his seat, he would not hesitate for a moment to enter the fray. It is that important.
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Hour Two
Tuesday  16 February 2016   / Hour 2, Block A:  Stephen F. Cohen is Prof. Emeritus of Russian Studies/History/Politics at NYU and Princeton. He is also a member of the Board of the recently-formed American Committee for East-West Accord (eastwestaccord.com); in re:  Turkey – meaning NATO – vs Russia.  Russian Eastern Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church. Poroshenko (president in Kiev) demanded the resignation of Yatseniuk (PM); a standoff. New cold war between the US and Russia; Medvedev in Munich at the annual security conference: “We are now in a new cold war.”  John Kerry: Russia is our main enemy.  Mtg between Pope Francis and the Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill in Cuba.   . . . 
Tuesday  16 February 2016   / Hour 2, Block B: Stephen F. Cohen, eastwestaccord.com, in re: Russia and geostrategy (2 of 4)
Tuesday  16 February 2016   / Hour 2, Block C: Stephen F. Cohen, eastwestaccord.com, in re: Russia and geostrategy (3 of 4)
Tuesday  16 February 2016   / Hour 2, Block D: Stephen F. Cohen, eastwestaccord.com, in re: Russia and geostrategy (4 of 4)
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-syria-turkey-idUSKCN0VP0WO
http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/syrian-troops-kurdish-forces-make-gains-countrys-north-36966411
http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/02/15/a-pope-a-patriarch-and-a-missing-superpower/
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-ukraine-crisis-politics-idUSKCN0VP0RG
 
Hour Three
Tuesday  16 February 2016   / Hour 3, Block A:   Dr Lara M Brown, George Washington University, and Salena Zito, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, in re:  FIRST ON BUZZ: After debate, Trump still tops SC GOP presidential race Donald Trump still is leading the S.C. Republican presidential race after the weekend's ...
South Carolina GOP Voters Feel the Benefits of Free Trade—but Also the Scars
A Look at Donald Trump Supporters Ahead of the South Carolina Primary
 Tuesday  16 February 2016   / Hour 3, Block B:  Dr Lara M Brown, George Washington University, and Salena Zito, Pittsburgh Tribune- Review, in re:   South Carolina, big leads on both sides  Still, Democratic voters in South Carolina aren't as firm in their choices as Democrats in New Hampshire or Iowa were, according to ...   7 Takeaways from Poll That Shows Trump, Clinton with Large SC ...
Tuesday  16 February 2016   / Hour 3, Block C:   Malcolm Hoenlein, Conference of Presidents, in re: http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/syrian-troops-kurdish-forces-make-gains-countrys-north-36966411
Tuesday  16 February 2016   / Hour 3, Block D:  John Tamny, RealClearPolitics, and Forbes.com, in re:  Credit is not money.  If it were, it would be easy for any country to create lots of it.  Credit is real economic resources created in the real economy (tractors, computers, labor, etc.), which is a reminder that the Fed can neither expand nor contract credit (economic resources) that comes at a cost, and that generally doesn't sit idle.  The Fed's talk of 'negative' interest rates is an attempt to convince banks to lend dollar reserves held at the Fed, and that the Fed has been paying interest (25 basis points) on.  But the fact that banks have excess reserves at the Fed in the first place is simple proof that negative rates won't cause them to lend more than they already are.  Missed by the Fed is that with production in the real economy relatively subdued, so is demand for loans. If loan demand were credible, banks wouldn't be holding excess reserves at the Fed as is.  A central bank rushing toward irrelevance is truly pushing on a string.   The Fed's Flirtation with Negative Rates Signals Its Rush Toward Irrelevance
Hour Four
Tuesday  16 February 2016   / Hour 4, Block A:   Robert Zimmerman, behindtheblack, in re:  The graffiti inside Apollo 11   An effort to create a 3D model of the inside of the Apollo 11 capsule on display at the National Air & Space Museum has revealed previously undocumented notes and scribbles that the astronauts put on the capsule’s walls.
Needell and his team also decided that they would provide access to the lower equipment bay, the area located below the astronauts’ seats, which housed the ship’s navigation sextant, telescope and computer. “No one from the Smithsonian, as far I knew — not as long as I’ve been the curator for 20 years — has ever been below there to document the conditions or any of the aspects of the lower equipment bay,” said Needell. “We’ve been able to sort of see above the seats, but that’s about all.”
So, for the first time, the curators removed from the lower bay the large bag that held the Apollo 11 crew’s pressure garment assemblies — in other words, their spacesuits — as well as several helmet bags and a checklist pocket that command module pilot Michael Collins used while orbiting the moon alone. And then they saw it, the literal writing on the wall.
They have located at least one post-landing image that shows some of the writing, which indicates that in 1969 no one considered this important enough to note. Then the capsule was put on display, and no one was allowed in it for decades.
Tuesday  16 February 2016   / Hour 4, Block B:  Robert Zimmerman, behindtheblack   LISA Pathfinder’s cubes floating free  More gravitational wave news: LISA Pathfinder’s two gold-platinum 46mm cubes have been released and are now floating free inside their spacecraft.
After a week of further testing, they will stop controlling the cube’s positions with electrostatic force. They will then watch them very precisely with lasers to test whether the equipment is capable of detecting distance shifts small enough for a future version, made up of three such spacecraft, to detect gravitational waves. The idea is that, as a wave rolls by, the cubes will shift positions at slightly different times, just as different beach balls will do so on ocean waves.  (2 of 2) 
Tuesday  16 February 2016   / Hour 4, Block C: Justice Brennan: Liberal Champion by Seth Stern (1 of 2)
Tuesday  16 February 2016   / Hour 4, Block D:  Justice Brennan: Liberal Champion, by Seth Stern(2 of 2)
 
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