Middle daughter’s circle of Russian ex-pat friends from the university all have family back home, and something that bothers them is Putin’s youth programs –which apparently he backs much as our first lady always has a pet social project –which are springing up all over the country. The kids here report that the programs ‘change’ the kids over there, that they become extreme patriots, extremely critical of the USA, and –get this –they’re being encouraged to marry young and get busy reversing the falling birth rate. Couple such straws in the wind as that with the strange Baron Samedi political vision emanating from well, Putin, and, well, if you’ve never read Nazi propaganda, you should. The opinion papers I’ve read (several linked in these Belmont threads) seem like the reading equivalent of listening to one of those Nazi heavies you see in wartime Hollywood and English films, where he’s glassy-eyed, talking at the middle of your forehead, in a strange high decibel voice, two notes above normal, and almost without thought. i don’t think Nazism died in 1945. Not by a long shot.