The aesthetics of the communist space program as an anticedent to crisis of meaning on the left.

"What post-capitalism needs is an imaginary that intersects the above justifications with a positive vision of the future that capitalism has failed to deliver. And part of this means rescuing the most lasting merits of the Soviet experiment. For while everyone can agree that the USSR had many failings, it remains the case that the artistic, architectural and technological development it stood for was in many cases a widely recognized concrete achievement. No one can deny the quality of their space programme. Even recently in London there has been two major exhibitions showcasing some of futurist ambitions of Soviet communism: Building the Revolution at the Royal Academy of Arts and the Red Skies season of Soviet science fiction at the British Film institute.  There is an element of aesthetics here as well as actual ambitions."

A woman win the Nobel in Economics; a political scientist. "Ms. Ostromand Mr. Williamson's... work found that people in business adopt for themselves numerous forms of regulation and rules of behavior — “governance” — doing so independently of government or without being told to do so by corporate bosses. The Nobel judges, in their description of their achievement, said that “economic science” should extend beyond market theory and into actual behavior, and the two award winners, in their empirical work, had achieved this. Summarizing their findings, the award announcement said: “Rules that are imposed from the outside or unilaterally dictated by powerful insiders have less legitimacy and are more likely to be violated. Likewise, monitoring and enforcement work better when conducted by insiders than by outsiders. These principles are in stark contrast to the common view that monitoring and sanctions are the responsibility of the state and should be conducted by public employees.”"

Given Hitchins article (tr.im/pG8Q), I'm not sure this is relevent. But it sure is interesting! "It is widely acknowledged that humans are very bad at making up random numbers... There are far too many 7s, for a start, and not enough 5s. Such results would occur in fewer than four in 100 non-manipulated election results, they write. That would not rule out Iran’s election being fair. But Scacco and Berber note that previous work has proven that humans have trouble generating “non-adjacent digits”, ie: 27 as opposed to 23, or 36 rather than 34. Non-manipulated results should be approximately 70% non-adjacent digits; Iran’s results are 62% non-adjacent... "Each of these two tests provides strong evidence that the numbers released by Iran’s Ministry of the Interior were manipulated. But taken together, they leave very little room for reasonable doubt... a bet that the numbers are clean is a one in two-hundred long shot.""