“The Russians can turn us into ash in less than an hour.”

(Picture Source)

Said : Martin Hellman, an emeritus professor at Stanford and adjunct fellow at the Federation of American Scientists who specialises in nuclear risk, as reported by the Newsweek’s Europe correspondent Elisabeth Braw in her yesterday’s post “Putin is ‘Playing the Madman’ to Trick the West.”

The Newsweek article quotes Hellmen saying that in the past couple of years, Putin has gone out of his way to keep Russia’s arsenal in the forefront of the public consciousness.

“Nuclear weapons are the card that Putin has up his sleeve, and he’s using it to get the world to realise that Russia is a superpower, not just a regional power,” he explains.

“The West should do as marriage therapists advise: admit one’s own mistakes, thereby making it easier for one’s spouse to admit his.”

Martin Hellmen

According to the article, Hellmen calls it the Madman Theory and confesses that a bit of perceived madness is essential to nuclear strategy. “The West hasn’t properly caught on to Putin’s Armageddon game. With Putin what is needed is to prevent the madman game from ending in tragedy”, Hellman argues warning that “The Russians can turn us into ash in less than an hour.”

The article analyses various aspects of Putin’s personality and the CIA’s role in preparing personality profiles of foreign leaders besides the work of independent personality analysis experts and psychologists in this area.

The article rules out the possibility of Putin stepping down to enjoy a pleasant retirement (like many world leaders) with his $200bn fortune that he’s reportedly amassed.

So, what’s the way out? Hellman is reported to have suggested that “the West should do as marriage therapists advise: admit one’s own mistakes, thereby making it easier for one’s spouse to admit his.”

The recent suicide-cum-mass murder by the co-pilot, Andreas Lubitz, of the Germanwings flight by crashing the plane in the French Alps is being largely seen as the result of his deep rooted mental condition. If, God forbid, Putin follows a mental trajectory similar to that of Lubitz, the whole world will perish. I find already there are serious discussions taking place, the world over (in pubic domain) about Putin's mental condition. A number of top influential people have even gone to the extent of calling him mad. One of the important lessons that we must learn from the Germanwings tragedy is that mental fitness is supreme and if we have diagnosed some one of the level of Putin having serious symptoms of mental disorder then it cannot, and should not, be taken lightly. The handling of such a person by the global community has to be quite cautious, coordinated, secret and aimed at preventing the worst while assuming the worst case scenario. This also requires top world leaders to be 24x7 ready to prevent the worst from happening and to promptly respond to any eventuality. 

"Be less grandstanding with Putin," Hellmen's advice can be quite handy in this case. Also, the suggestion of a recently departed Moscow ambassador, who was close to Putin, as reported in the Newsweek post, also deserves serious consideration. "If you’ve got a madman in power, a country’s nuclear weapons take on a completely new dimension.” 

In a nutshell, Putin, like any ultra high pressure glass vessel, is required to be handled with extreme care.

There is “a complete absence of fear” in Silicon Valley right now, and more people than ever before are employed by companies losing money.

Bill Gurley

Said : Bill Gurley, General Partner, Benchmark Capital and the prominent investor behind Uber and Snapchat. He said this at the 22nd annual South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive festival (held in Austin, Texas, held from Friday, March 13 through Tuesday, March 17.) during an interview, on March 15. The interview was conducted by award-winning journalist and author Malcolm Gladwell on the SXSW stage.  

"There is no fear in Silicon Valley right now," Gurley said. "A complete absence of fear." Clarifying his stand on the bubble threat, he said : "We are in a risk bubble, not a tech bubble. We are taking on a level of risk never seen before in the history of Silicon Valley." Observing that more and more companies are today becoming dependent on venture dollars, Gurley cautioned that good companies need to be mindful of irrational venture capital funding to support competitors.

According to Steve Tay (@iamstevetay), who tweeted the entire interview live, Gurley opined that driverless cars must be virtually perfect to be acceptable to consumers. "It's shifting from drinking and driving to texting and driving. Let's just have less people drive," he said. Commenting on car sharing services like Uber, he said : "A product like Uber is absolutely transformational in any country or region it goes into." According to Gurley, Uber was the largest job creator in the San Francisco area accounting for over 300,000 drivers on the road. Another point, Gurley said, was that millennials now view cars as utility and not a social statement. This makes Uber a much better way to utilize the resource as 97% of cars are estimated to be idle.

Acknowledging the role of risk in success of a venture, Gurley said : "The further you get away from risk, the more people forget about it." At the same time he observed that "We've reduced number of casual risks in exchange for more catastrophic risks."

According to Southwest Interactive, Gurley and his partners at Benchmark led the early venture investments in GrubHub, Nextdoor, OpenTable, Snapchat, Stitch Fix, Twitter, Uber, Yelp and more. He writes a blog on the evolution and economics of high technology businesses called Above the Crowd. Gladwell, a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1996, is the author of five New York Times Best Sellers, including David and Goliath, The Tipping Point, What The Dog Saw, Blink and Outliers.

Bill Gurley is interviewed by 

award-winning journalist and author 

Malcolm Gladwell on the SXSW stage.

“Flight 370 showed that in today’s very connected world, the idea that we cannot know where every airplane is at any given moment has become unacceptable”

Rémi Jouty (Picture source)

Said : Rémi Jouty, the director of the French Bureau of Investigations and Analysis (FBIA), commenting on the ongoing search operations for the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 (a Boeing 777), which took off from Kuala Lumpur Airport and vanished en route to Beijing on March 8, 2014 with 239 people aboard. The FBIA has been advising investigators on the case.

According to a news report by Michael Forsythe and Keith Bradsher in The New York Times of March 5, 2015, the investigators are also considering, what they call, “rogue pilot theory,” as the most plausible explanation among several because some of the investigators and experts feel that deliberate human intervention, most likely by someone in the cockpit, may have caused the aircraft. A retired chief pilot of Malaysia Airlines, Nik Huzlan, is reported to be one of them. 

Incidentally, Huzlan has been a close friend of Zaharie Ahmad Shah, the pilot who flew the plane that fateful day, since last 30 years.

Picture source

Huzlan, while clarifying that he had never seen anything in more than 30 years of friendship that would suggest that Mr. Zaharie was capable of such a deed, said : “Based on logic, when you throw emotion away, it seems to point a certain direction which you can’t ignore.” “Your best friend can harbor the darkest secrets,” he reportedly added. The co-pilot, Fariq Abdul Hamid, is also being seen as the likely culprit.

Picture source

Four ships under contract by the Australian and Malaysian governments are searching the likely site spread over an area of 23,000-square miles in the Indian Ocean. Nearly half the area has been scoured so far but no trace of the missing plane has been found and the mystery over its disappearance continues. The job is expected to be completed by May.

Picture source

In an era where a missing mobile phone can be located in moments, it is hard to believe that a wide-body jetliner can simply vanish like the Flight 370. The need for closer flight tracking measures, including real-time streaming of flight data, is again being discussed within the aviation industry. It is reported that the International Civil Aviation Organization, a United Nations body, wants that "all airliners should be equipped to have the ability, by November 2016, to automatically report their position at least every 15 minutes, twice as often as the current average of around 30 minutes."

I do not agree with Shanti Bhushan's view about Kiran Bedi

Prashant Bhushan

Said : AAP leader and Shanti Bhushan’s son Prashant Bhushan, reacting to an earlier assessment. He said he does not agree with his father. "I do not agree with Shanti Bhushan's view about Kiran Bedi. She was always against joining politics," Prashant pointed out while reacting to his father's praising the BJP decision to rope in Kiran Bedi, India's first woman IPS officer, for the upcoming Delhi Assembly elections. AAP patriarch Shanti Bhushan had added that Bedi as a good administrator is capable of providing Delhi a clean administration. (Source : Video on HT website available at the following link)

Watch the video appearing on Hindustan Times Website

"The EU is always playing by the rules. Putin is always playing with the rules"

Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk
(Photo Source : Web portal of Ukrainian Government)

Said : Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk in an interview with Spiegel conducted by Matthias Schepp and Christoph Schult published on December 20, 2014. 

The interview centered around Putin's aggression in eastern Ukraine, implementing the Minsk Protocol (the Ukraine ceasefire protocol-signed in Minsk-being monitored by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, OSCE), possibility of Ukraine joining the EU, Chancellor Angela Merkel's role in the Ukraine crisis, and host of other points including the US support.

The key points made by Ukrainian PM :

• Putin thought he could split the EU, but the opposite happened. Putin did not expect the kind of unity the US and the EU have shown. 
• Putin's policies have turned him into a drug-addicted person. His survival depends on land grabs of foreign territories. He needs new annexations. The annexation of Crimea has gained him much applause at home. But that will not last forever. 
• If 85 percent of Russians support the annexation of Crimea and the aggression against Ukraine, that is a very bad sign.
• Ukrainian youth wants to belong to Europe. (Joining) the EU remains our dream. We must not give it up. Otherwise Putin would win. His goal is to undermine the EU. This is not only about a conflict between Russia and Ukraine. Russia is fighting against the West and its values. 
• (German Chancellor Angela) Merkel is a flagship of the EU. Not everything depends on her, but much does. I have been shocked in a positive way by how Merkel is defending international law so openly and strongly. She wants to have peace and stability in the EU, and she knows that Russia is a problem in terms of security. 

Full interview

"India is a very rich fiancée"

Alexander Kadakin

Said : Russian Ambassador to India - Alexander Kadakin - at a press conference on December 8 to clarify that Russia was not jealous over President Barack Obama courting India, as reported by Douglas Busvine in Reuters' blog. Kadakin was probably referring to India's invitation to Obama for the Republic Day celebrations.

“We don’t feel jealous, though of course I say that India is a very rich fiancée. It is good for a rich fiancée to have a beautiful bridegroom. But they should not promise you a marriage and then betray you,” Reuters quoted Kadakin as saying.

The press conference was held to discuss Putin's visit to India on Dec 11 during which he is expected to unveil a bilateral vision document aimed at boosting trade and investment between the two countries, especially in the fields of nuclear energy and defense.

The blog notes that "Indo-Russian friendship recently has become strained as India relies more on U.S. and French companies to meet its defense needs." Russia has expressed its discomfort over India's over-reach to the United States by signing a defense cooperation pact with Pakistan recently.

However, Kadakin has been reported to have dispelled India's fears on military sales to Pakistan and speculations of any sort of Russia-China-Pakistan triangle formation in a new world order because of Delhi getting closer to US. He also assured that "Russia will never ever do anything to the detriment to the security of India, a close and old friend," reported Dipanjan Roy Chaudhury in Economic Times.

Talking heads: Prime Minister Narendra Modi with Russian President Vladimir Putin 

and US President Barack Obama during G20 Summit in Brisbane. PTI (Photo Source)

India's position is really tricky in the prevailing messy situation involving the three big powers namely, the US, China and Russia. It is going to be a sort of litmus test for PM Modi to demonstrate his policy skills to strike a balance which is in India's favour from a long-term view point. Any fiancée, rich or poor, has to get settled sooner or later by making a decision at some point of time. And, India cannot be an exception. We expect Modi to have India's choice quite clear.

"Money, after all, only has value as long as we think it does."

Matt O'Brien

Matt O'Brien, in his report "Checkmate, Putin. Russia’s economy is stuck in a catch-22", in The Washington Post of December 16, 2014.

Matt discusses the unprecedented fall of the Russian currency - ruble - to the lowest level of 80 rubles per dollar despite increase in the interest rates from 10.5 to 17 percent. According to him, Russia is facing the economic catch-22 situation for which, typically, the word "checkmate" is used. 

Russians have totally lost confidence in their currency. They are using any rubles they can't turn into dollars to go on shopping sprees buying things like like cars, real estate, Ikea furniture, and Apple products, which is only going to lead to ruble's faster demise.

"Money, after all, only has value as long as we think it does. If ordinary people decide that they'd rather turn all their rubles that are rapidly losing value into things that won't,"  Matt writes adding that Russians are exactly doing that. "It's a bank run on the currency. Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev has already asked Russia's top exporters to behave "responsibly" and Russian Finance Ministry has started selling foreign currency to keep ruble alive.

It is widely felt that in order to stabilise ruble, Putin might declare capital controls that make it illegal for people or companies to turn their rubles into foreign currency. Next few days are going to be crucial not only for Russia but for global markets, too.