In the days after the fall of the Berlin Wall it was possible to think that history, in the sense of a competition between systems, had stopped. The idea was expressed in the phrase The End of History, which implied that there was no conceivable challenge to the triumph of the liberal democratic system. The future would consist of refining the system to the last decimal place. But if 9/11 did not throw the proposition of the End of History into doubt, then the recent Russo-Georgian war has. When did the End of History End? At what point did the project lose steam? Del Shannon asked:
As I walk alone, I wonder
What went wrong
Philip Bobbitt (I’ve fixed the link) has an idea: the calm 1990s marked a time when the old order ended. That obscured the fact that a new one had not taken its place. One history had ended. But a new replacement history had only just begun.
After 1990, perhaps the West’s greatest problem was the integration of the post-Soviet states into a global legal and economic order from which they had long been isolated. Some promising steps were taken but an American-inspired programme of rapid privatisation in Russia undercut all this. It impoverished the Russian people while selling off national assets to corrupt privateers. …
the developed states began to move from the constitutional order of nation states, which had fought the Cold War, to market states. In Europe, the EU began to evolve away from a super-nation state toward a more flexible congeries of national enclaves … In China, the embrace of free trade, private investment and market pricing were similar events. Elsewhere, sovereign wealth funds created further harbingers of this new order. A global system of human rights norms was given martial effect in the former state of Yugoslavia, another event that reflected this dramatic evolution of states.
But not in Russia. There political and economic leaders — and their Western advisers — confused the market with the market state, creating a vast criminal enterprise that more resembled the Mafia than the multinational corporation. In such circumstances, it is hardly surprising that the nation state has come roaring back. …
The essence of Bobbit’s argument is that the West now lives in a world ‘beyond the country’ — in a globalized economy, in a world in which the old values — some would call them prejudices — no longer bind. However, not everyone followed suit. Some parts of the world had been left behind. Not every nation was willing to go into voluntary liquidation; not every set of values was willing to set itself aside. And the conflicts we observe are the consequences of that imperfect shift. September 11 and the Russo-Georgian war proved that neither the concept of religion nor nation is wholly dead. Del Shannon’s question of what went wrong is answered by John Lennon’s.
Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace
What went wrong is that someone forgot to tell Osama Bin Laden that religion had been abolished; and someone similarly forgot to tell the Russians, South Ossetians and Georgians that there are no more countries. If 9/11 was a visit from the 8th century, Russia’s incursion into the near abroad was blast for the 19th century past. Bobbitt thinks that Putin will not be able to roll back the trend toward the market state; that form of polity that lives upon a globalized, intertwined planet. And the way forward, he argues, lies in strengthening International Law and creating institutions which will admit the hold-outs.
[Putin] will not be able to reverse the ultimate trend toward market states; this new constitutional order is too formidable an innovation meekly to give way. Indeed the Russian tactic of granting vast numbers of Ossetians Russian citizenship — which gave it the legal pretext that it used to intervene — is at bottom a market state manoeuvre which encourages multiple juridical identities. But the hope that the transition away from nation states could be done without bloodshed in Europe has been dashed. The end of the first era of globalised constitutional transformation has come with unpredictable consequences because war, as Clausewitz told us, has its own momentum. I should be surprised if there were no further violence in Georgia.
But if it is Bobbitt’s judgment that Putin’s resistance is futile, he like Osama bin Laden will give it a try. Bobbitt’s thesis that the market state will replace the traditional one is intelectually appealing, but it suffers from one weakness. Events since September 11 and the invasion of Georgia demonstrate that the only effective riposte to national expansion is the instinct to national self-preservation; that all that stands in the way of radical Islamic culture is a self-conciously Western culture. Very few people will be willing to stand up to Russian armor or a suicide bomber for the idea of the International Law. At an emotive level, it is still the notion of home, family and group that provides the motivation to sacrifice. In Macaulay’s words:
To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his gods,
Lennon would not have understood. The problem is that the only bar to a militant faith and an expansionary nation is another throwback: and that is why both are effectively opposed by the one great power on earth enough residual faith and national self confidence left to hang together. If Philip Bobbitt’s market state future ever comes into being, it will be behind the protection of the last nation. The core problem that advocates of a stateless, post-national and faithless world face is why anyone should fight for it. A world where there is “nothing to kill or die for” is fundamentally helpless to defend itself.
In a video conversation about the Georgia conflict with Jonah Goldberg, Robert Wright described the attitude of “liberal realists” governing international involvement as being in part about whether it would advance the rule of international law or not. Thus the good thing about expelling Saddam Hussein from Kuwait during Desert Storm was that it enshrined the principle of territorial inviolability. But there is something slightly delusional about expecting nation states to expend treasure and lives in order to wither away. Can a supranational association of market states ever come into existence without the emergence of an international elite which owes allegiance to no nation but to the world itself? Or put another, no allegiance but to itself?
Tip Jar.
Whoa. FIRST!
The idea of the ‘market state’ appears to be one of those insights that seems so reasonable and logical in Harvard Yard and elsewhere where the Best and Brightest gather to figure out our future. Yet somewhere between Sudan and the Khyber Pass it has aquired the taste ashes and dust.
“The core problem that advocates of a stateless, post-national and faithless world”
Sounds like “Between Two Ages” – now that is some expensive paper, and neolib – for those so fond of the term neocon.
What was the term… Old Europe?
Or as this author writes Their sclerotic global standing is but a result of socialist policies that have helped push the best and brightest away from the region, leaving in their stead a bunch of subsidy grabbers and welfare cheats.
I still can’t figure out why anybody gives a rat’s ass about Georgia. It’s a dysfunctional hill-billy enclave full of primitive, cruel, bad-tempered, revenge-seeking misfits. And it’s always been so. Their most famous citizen was Joe Stalin. Every once in a while the place needs a slap on the side of the head. In America, you have no idea what it’s like having neighbours like that. Maybe it’s a shame for a “new democracy” full of bad-tempered mafiosos to be whacked like that, but, really, who cares? They need it. If Russia didn’t wallop them into shape every few years, the Turks would have joyfully killed them all of long ago and this would be a non-story.
The Market State idiocy is the fantasy of too much money and security, for too long. It’s the intellectual equivalent of Marie Antoinette playing milkmaid in a marble palace.
Here are more flaws in the market state and the idiot assumptions that only an intellectual like Bobbit could make:
1. Technology gives failing, failed, and chaotic groups/states/people the ability to simply take by conquest money, power, people, and resources from wealth, modern states. Today, Georgia. Or Kuwait as with Saddam. Or perhaps, Israel. Tomorrow, maybe Spain. Or Italy. Or Poland. All near poorer neighbors, not shy about killing people to take things.
In 1941, the power of the Imperial Japanese Navy and Army was awesome, and threatened the US with defeat in the Pacific for two and half years afterwards. Now, Pakistan, a nation that cannot keep the street in front of the Presidential palace from becoming an open sewer during rainy season, has in each of it’s more than 100 nukes, nearly 100 times the total combined destructive power of the entire armed force of Imperial Japan in 1941.
2. Effective disarmament allows even a weak state, to dominate more modern neighbors, if it retains any military force at all. Russia is reputedly using 50 year old pilots, and elderly aircraft, in it’s Georgian campaign. No matter, something still beats nothing.
3. The Nation State, Ethnic/Religious solidarity, Patriotism, Chauvinism, and more are STRONGER not weaker, the greater the social change in other aspects of life. The more people feel uncertain, threatened economically, and culturally, the more changes seem to negative rather than positive events for them (they get poorer not richer), the more that people will “cling” to institutions that are proven by history to work, and amplify their collective power. The Nation-state and patriotism, are among the biggest and most proven institutions that work.
It is no accident that rightist groups are rising in Europe, precisely where change threatens to erase national identity and disadvantage the average person.
4. The “Market State” is a FANTASY BUILT ON CHEAP OIL. This is the big one. Once oil becomes expensive, economic activity comes to a grinding halt, people become poorer, “market states” degenerate into mercantilist empires, extracting raw resources and exploiting slave/serf labor in closed economic systems.
Market States cannot and do not survive economic downturns, which are bound to happen when critical resources (energy now, which means oil) are constrained.
Oil at $150 a barrel for sustained decades means closed economies, resource wars, high inflation, very little business investment. The 1970′s, in other words.
jj, afaik the hillbillies are in the mountains and not too feuding. Georgians on the flatland have a long and civilized history and have contributed in many fields during the Soviet days. Tbilisi U. math school is still pretty solid and goes back decades. This is really cooked by Russia with Ossetian org crime being once again the willing tool.
Has anyone here read LeCarre’s “Our Game” ?
but, thats hardly the point jj, the point is that you may be next. or one after the next.
Georgia’s territorial integrality has to be seen in context of international commitments and regional arrangements. The 2 Russian majority regions that Georgia’s nationalist government chose to bomb, were given to Georgia in trust, in exchange for membership in the Commonwealth of Independent States. Shortly after, Gamasakhurdia won election to the Presidency, on a “Georgia for Georgians” campaign. Civil war followed. Why wouldn’t Russians view Georgia’s trust obligations as breached?
Russia is a signatory to the Helsinki Accords (1977). Under same, states – including the US, Canada and EVERY European state – affirmed a commitment to meet international standards, viz protection of minorities. Re the Georgian trust lands, Russia had every right to revoke the breached trust arrangement and reclaim sovereign authority. In addition, they had an obligation to protect nationals, in face of Georgian brutalization. I heard Russian claims of “2000″ dead at the hands of Georgia’s army; I doubt same, however, I am open to receiving proof. It is true that the Georgian shelling was indiscriminate. Georgia used Putin’s presence at the Olympics as a smokescreen to decide the sovereignty issue by force. All that was needed was incorporation under NATO, with its mutual defense provision (Article 5). Russia had every right to respond in kind to Georgia’s move, which was clearly directed towards completing Gamsakhurdia’s ethnic cleansing campaign. Nobody intervened in 1992. The same issues arose in 2008.
In spite of irresponsible media coverage, it appears that Russia has no intention to capture Georgia. They have committed to withdraw troops back to the 2 enclaves, and claim to be conducting only “intelligence” and “disarmament” operations outside of same.
Of course they will be held to that. And given that they have strong friends in Georgia, friendly relations could develop. Incidently, every interview with Georgians reveals extreme contempt for the nationalists. In that context, it is folly to claim those lame ducks as allies.
Strong opinions arose out of this incident. I ask that those who defend the Georgians settle the issue of the nationalist’s attempt to use NATO as an instrument for ethnic cleansing. And: if you know nothing about Gamsakhurdia, you really shouldn’t be commenting on this issue. We don’t need another Cold War. That can happen unless reason prevails, and open minds are valued. Please reconsider your rush to judgment.
Putin and bin Laden are under pressure, and so reverted to type. Russian-ness is dying, Islam is dying, what’s a bully-boy to do? Why, lash out, of course.
But Putin might have real reason. There is an arch of instability that stretches from Eastern Europe through the Stans to China, North Korea, and Japan. Meanwhile, the core is rotting. The invasion of Ossettia was a message for the arch – “Don’t even think about it”.
The ever cheerfull Spengler said it better than me: The world is full of undead tribes with delusions of grandeur, and soon-to-be-extinct peoples who rather would go out with a bang than a whimper. The supra-ethnic states of the world have a common interest in containing the mischief that might be made by the losers.
But some undead tribes can be quite large. When Russia and Islam’s turn comes to die, they will take a few of us with them.
ADE
To Mackinder, the area known as the Heartland was the key to understanding the shift from an era of seapower’s dominance to one where land power would reign. The Heartland was defined as the Eurasian core (read: central Russia) at the center of the World-Island[19] which is protected from seapower by vast distances of land. In Democratic Ideals and Reality, Mackinder warned: “Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland. Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island. Who rules the World-Island commands the World.”[20] Therefore, he proposed that Eastern Europe is the central piece of terrain for balancing the Heartland’s power. His ideas would help to shape the West’s perception of the Soviet threat and the conduct of the Cold War.
For centuries, Georgia has occupied the strategically vital land bridge between the Black and Caspian Seas.
This sounds a lot like the argument in Natan Sharansky’s latest book, Defending Identity. Basically he says that in the Gulag, those who had no identity were more easily turned by the interrogators than those who had a strong identity. He used religious identity as an example, and thought that people find meaning in it to live their lives their own way. He criticized many Russian intellectuals for believing they could find a more pure existence in science or academics, and create a post-identity. Unfortunately while they were busy building a more pure existence, others were hatching plans to send them off to Siberia.
John Lennon was killed by a man with a gun. In this case, the man killed him because the demon ADH$Ebfd4ydfksdf told him to, or whatever. He was insane. But imagine Lennon was killed by an ordinary mugger after his wallet. He might have talked to the mugger about root causes and the brotherhood of man, nothing to kill or die for. But I am sure a mugger would be unimpressed, and Lennon just as dead. Whoever said that a conservative was a liberal who had been mugged, made a clever observation.
However many Liberals and Conservatives and Post Identities and Nation States we have, now matter how many Root Causes are addressed, I am sure that humans will always, always have people unwilling to play by the rules. We will always have crime. We will always have conflicts, even wars. You can’t wish that away with “post identity” or anything else. We are an imperfect and imperfectable species, and thank goodness for that.
A rat’s ass about Georgia?
To Mackinder, the area known as the Heartland was the key to understanding the shift from an era of seapower’s dominance to one where land power would reign. The Heartland was defined as the Eurasian core (read: central Russia) at the center of the World-Island[19] which is protected from seapower by vast distances of land. In Democratic Ideals and Reality, Mackinder warned: “Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland. Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island. Who rules the World-Island commands the World.”[20] Therefore, he proposed that Eastern Europe is the central piece of terrain for balancing the Heartland’s power. His ideas would help to shape the West’s perception of the Soviet threat and the conduct of the Cold War.
For centuries, Georgia has occupied the strategically vital land bridge between the Black and Caspian Seas.
Whiskey,
I am with you on 1, 2, and 3 (though I am wary of the “cling” argument). But 4 I am not so sure about.
What is so special about cheap oil? It is only our domestic politics that keeps us from exploring our territory with modern methods and drilling our own. We have no need for mercantilism, since political pressure is building for us to have access to our own resources. There are also political roadblocks keeping us from, say, building more nuke plants and mining more coal, which would allow us to adapt to the absence of oil.
My point is, you’re going too far with #4. The suppliers of foreign oil will flood the market if the US and others seriously start looking at removing the blocks on our own resources.
Why is Georgia important? Why do geopolitics matter?
Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland.
For centuries, Georgia has occupied the strategically vital land bridge between the Black and Caspian Seas
“And the way forward, he argues, lies in strengthening International Law”
Who is supposed to enforce “International Law”? How is that enforcement going to be done?
Until those questions are addressed, “International Law” is meaningless drivel. There is only one ultimate way to back up any law — and that is with the gun.
yes, ADE, i agree that this was a demonstration of a slapdown for other would-be defectors from the Russian sphere, or “roof” as they say over there.
They want to hurt Georgia, not necessarily take it over, supercargo. which brings us to your other points — I understand that there are competing narratives here, the one competing to the “ethnic cleansing” you put forward is that the Ossetian thugs, with Russian sponsorship fired at Georgian villages from within Tskhenvali, a tactic of (own) human shield much practiced by the so-called Palestinians (Hamas) and Hezbollah.
Georgians were presumably less restrained in their response than Israel has been (which restrained has not improved Israeli security).
With such competing narratives evidence is the only key, although I am sure Russians will come up with plenty victims. Evidence of Russian preparation all the way back to explicitly bringing it up at Kosovo discussions as eye-for-eye lends credence to Russia being the aggressor here.
Matt –
Consider the trans-Pacific trade that underlies the “market state” so-called between China and the US.
That runs on cheap oil. With Oil too expensive, even the most efficient cargo ships won’t be running. Those $150 dollar retail Nikes will instead be made in the US, and the market will only bear $20 for them.
Cheap transport costs is the fundamental underlying economic requirement for lots of trade in goods.
As for oil prices, Iran, Russia, Venezuela, the Gulf states, have nothing but oil. They can only survive with high oil prices because all other attempts to diversify have failed. Mostly due to the demands of their thug networks that in one form or another (Wahabbist religious police in Saudi, Putin’s thugs in Russia) prop up their regimes and demand constant flows of cash to pay off.
Bully boys don’t come cheap.
Eventually we can and will explore our own oil resources, particularly as trade breaks down. As it will with high oil prices. However, each oil producing nation in the Gulf, and Russia, has huge incentives to jack up the price, OPEC is disorganized and leader-less, and Iran is well positioned to threaten to close the Gulf with Russian assistance.
Rest assured that neither Iran nor Russia can long survive cheap oil, and will take steps to make it dear. Given inelastic demand (people can’t just walk to work if it’s 50 miles away, most of Western Europe and America is built on cheap oil enabling people to live safely away from crime-ridden minorities) it could be decades before cheap(er) oil makes an appearance.
Or consider all these cheap call centers in the Philippines and India. Leveraging cheap labor and telecom costs. What if satellites are routinely knocked out, including commercial com satellites, by Russia or China seeking monopoly rents on satellite com? It doesn’t take much after all to cut cable, and it takes a lot to repair it.
Heck, even IRAN will eventually (within 10 years) have the ability to shoot down comm satellites. Imagine the protection racket that would give them! All you need is a ballistic missile and cheap computers. Both are on the verge of being commodities now.
The fallacy of the Market State fantasy is that the intellectuals never figure on people gaming the system. Cheating. Violence is the proven way to cheat and win. just look at Russia OR Iran.
How the West Fueled Putin’s Sense of Impunity
The Other Russia ^ | 8/15/2008 | Garry Kasparov
The money line in Kasparov’s piece is
“Last April, France opposed the American push to fast-track Georgia’s North Atlantic Treaty Organization membership.
………………..
I think the French were right. Thank You France.
Thing I keep wondering about and haven’t read anywhere: are the newly-minted Russian billionaires Putin clones owing their position to Vladimir and funneling a portion of their ill-gotten gains back to him; protection money, so to speak?
And if so, do we think those monies go directly to Putin’s personal Swiss bank account, to the KGB to buy better umbrella tips and more mysterious poisons, or towards some internal Russian government program?
And how deep does their ownership go of whatever companies it is they are leeching off of? How easy would it be for “the State” to step in (again) and take ownership of those companies away from the noveau riche Russians?
The equation for the last nation is simple:
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine/arch/solzhenitsyn/harvard1978.html
+
http://www.airforce-magazine.com/MagazineArchive/Documents/2007/April%202007/0407keeper.pdf
=
http://www.sweden.gov.se/sb/d/10022/a/109203
The biggest threat to a free market is the lack of a free press. The other sad fact is if you do a search of google news, you will find russia and georgia b*tching about the exact same stuff 8 years ago.
Whiskey: Cut our refiners some anti-trust slack: Let them guarantee $80 to $90 a barrel for ANY AND ALL crude oil—-or similar refineable substance produced in the USA or contiguous states and guarantee that price for 30-35 years.
Current producers will be happy to lower prices in return for sustained income especially when they know that anything else they can come up with will also get a profitable price.
We will run a surplus in short order. The kleptocrats will find themselves selling much less volume for much lower prices. Price at the pump will soften but remain high enough to discourage prolifigate use.
I do know the oil bidness. It is the wild swings in prices that cause the inability to meet debt service/retirement resulting in
bankruptcies for the last 20 years or so.
Do a little price fixing—-for the locals only— and we got that problem whipped.
When I tried to view the article at the Philip Bobbitt link, I came to a log-in webpage, and I did not know how to proceed.
However, I found a book review of Bobbitt’s apparently related book “Terror and Consent” at
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/04/11/arts/IDLEDE12.php?page=1
The “End of History” fallacy was based on the notion that the free market and free trade are “non-interventionist”.
In truth, freedom continuously intervenes into the comfort zone/financial zone of whatever “establishment” thinks it can go on being fat, dumb and happy.
The man who saw that fallacy coming to an end
and probably in the Caucascus region to boot?
John Paul II. Story related by Malachi Martin in “Keys Of This Blood”.
Those with a sound theo-cultural foundation deal with the messy dynamics of freedom in an ethical manner. That is us, and Georgia as well. Those who lack that sound foundation
resort to terror and conquest. Osama and Putin or both NYEEE KULTORNEE.
I did not ever consent to a world order based upon the “market state”. I recognize the United States of America and its Constitution, not the capitalist utopia of Thomas Friedman. According to Bobbitt, “the market-state promises to maximize the opportunity of each individual citizen”, and yet that runs the risk of promoting nations of sybaritic narcissists unwilling to defend either their own liberty or their own prosperity.
Citizenship without civic responsibility is an invitation to tyrants who promise free goodies for the voting class. The very concept of the “market state” risks enshrining political corruption as a high ideal, with the state itself becoming an influence bazaar for competing economic interests. I perceive something empty in a “market state”, for a mere promise to “maximize the opportunity of each individual citizen” ignores culture, philosophy, and community as the basic pillars of social harmony.
The ideal of a market utopia is every bit as dangerous as the ideal of a socialist utopia. When the prophets of global narcissism are unwilling to accept the reality of tradition and community as the basis of civilization, it should be no surprise that nationalistic and religious strife becomes severe. When people can no longer get the real thing, they grasp for counterfeit nationalism and counterfeit religion with just enough fanaticism to give them a good jolt of adrenalin. While the prophets of global narcissism shred the social fabric in the name of lower prices, lower taxes, and more goodies for all, street gangs and terrorists sell a counterfeit family with convenient enemies to scapegoat.
A state that bases its legitimacy upon catering to the desires of individual citizens without expecting anything in return is every bit as dangerous as the state that subordinates the needs of the individual to the state. A social contract balances the state’s obligations to the individual with the individual’s obligations to the state. Yes, there is often a need for low taxes. Yet, there is something inherently unhealthy about a state that delivers social services to the citizenry and yet levies no taxes. States that levy no taxes and yet deliver government services do exist; they are called Gulf monarchies. And it is precisely the moral lethargy of these states that creates al-Qaeda.
Let’s imagine that al-Qaeda is basically a bunch of grown men living out an Islamic version of a Dungeons & Dragons fantasy game. And Gulf monarchies DO “maximize the opportunity of each individual citizen” to live out one’s life in a lurid real-life fantasy role-playing game. In the West, players of Dungeons & Dragons eventually grow up. In a Gulf monarchy, not only do a select group of men get to live out the fantasy of becoming “Islamic adventurers”, but rich men get to vicariously participate in this fantasy through sending money to al-Qaeda.
Al-Qaeda should be considered to be the class clowns of Sunni Islam. These terrorists feed off social approval of their actions. When social approval of their behavior is taken away, their organization will wither and die. The key is to make them look stupid and ridiculous, and our enemy is doing part of our job for us already. For the time being, though, we need to understand how the “market state” is actually part of the problem that creates al-Qaeda in the first place.
Good news folks. Pat Buchanan has declared Russia the winner and Georgia the loser.
And as a result the Russian way will be the wave of the future. All because we neocon chickenhawks were determined to go bear-baiting.
I am serious when I say that Patrick J ain’t called one right yet and that he represents
those folks incapable of objective analysis.
Had he been around in the 1930s he would have called China the aggressor and Japan the victor. And since the Chinese were suffering, why that meant the Japs were getting stronger and stronger. (In truth, they kept weakening their ability to sustain an engagement with Uncle Sam.)
Thus the Buchanan pronouncements——in conjunction with those that called Russia justified—- are strong indicators that
our side will prevail.
So to honor our paleo gloom and doomers,
Buddy Larsen and I will now harmonize:
“Gloom despair and agony on me”
Deep dark depression, excessive misery”
If it wern’t for bad luck, ,
I would have no luck at all.
Gloom despair and agony on me.
(sob, sob sob)
Overall, it now seem like a US ally, Georgia,
will survive albeit in damaged condition.
Others in the “near abroad” are going to be
on the prod and even some eurowqeenies will be looking for where they left their testicles.
All Putin gets is a smidgin of cash flow from the pipeline, probably not enough to pacify
the kleptocrats. Some economic pressure will reduce his cash flow farther and increased friendly oil production is pure poison to him and some others as well.
Looks like we will come out of this one in pretty good shape for the long haul.
And in the hereafter, Mr putin will certainly
receive a proper reward. Spending eternity
with 72 Rosie O’Donnels.
Russia seems to be following Venezuela, which seems to be following Zimbabwe. Nationalize anything productive, distribute anything of value to cronies incapable of managing it, concentrate on extractive industries rather than those that create value, and focus the elite’s interests on shiny luxury goods from the West.
These regimes seem vulnerable to three things: (1) comparison to neighbors; (2) succession; or (3) spiraling economic collapse. Unfortunately, the usual reaction to these three problems usually involves selecting a scapegoat on the other side of the border and picking a fight. Of course, mugging the Jones family doesn’t make you look any better in comparison to the Smiths, there are still younger thugs meaning to depose the older, and the economy is probably doing much the same as it was before — less the costs of your war, plus your booty, minus your sanctions.
Dave — the problem is two fold:
One, a global marketplace for oil, with rising demand in India and China, along with expanding trans-Pacific, and for that matter trans-Atlantic trade, all of which require Oil. Lots of it, at cheap prices.
Two, long lead-times with lots of opposition in wealthy nations to “messy” energy exploration. We are not going to be drilling, any time soon, in the US because powerful and monied interests find it messy. As bad as a windfarm off ritzy Martha’s Vineyard. Our leaders, the elites, will simply not allow it. Even if they are shoved aside (which politically, they won’t be since they have the money and power — a woman like Nancy Pelosi represents the rich and powerful, she didn’t get where she is by representing working class people), it would take quite a long time to bring new supplies to the market.
Meanwhile the great amount of oil is in these places: the Gulf, Nigeria/West Africa, Indonesia, Russia, Venezuela and Mexico. These are the cards we were dealt.
I agree with Alexis views on market utopia. However, there is one insight where she is both wise and yet missed a point. AQ IS like a bunch of guys playing Dungeons and Dragons forever. That’s the whole point — polygamy limits their ability to form families. Stable, upwardly mobile families do not engage in terrorism. The Market State by creating, even in America, de-facto polygamy, with a few winners (women chasing a few men) and many losers, creates a passive defense.
It’s most NOTICEABLE in the Gulf States, because the effect of polygamy is strongest there, oldest in effect, longer in duration, and has more winners (Sheiks with harems) and more losers (guys like Egyptian-born Mohammed Atta, trained in Germany in Architecture, unable to form a family).
The passive, half-hearted defense of the Western way of life is PRECISELY because so few really have a stake in it. It’s no accident as the Marxists would say that the men who most expect to form their own families — working/middle class white guys from the “conservative” areas of the US, are the point of the spear in the US military.
Does anyone honestly expect men without the ability to form families to fight and die for that society? With massive amounts of single motherhood, the nuclear family passe, and the Sex and the City Lifestyle, of course few will fight for the West (and almost none in Western Europe where things have become immeasurably worse).
We’ve got the perfect storm — third world men (not poor either), ambitious and hungry and angry at being denied families seeking either 72 Virgins or brutal conquest to satisfy their basic sexual-companionship needs, and consumerized Western men substituting video games and porn for a real relationship as they are priced out of the relationship market, unwilling to fight and die for a society that gives them convenience. But not their own family.
In the presence of Sec State Rice, President Saakashvili said todaythe same thing as Kasparov:
While — when in April, in Bucharest, Georgia was denied Membership Action Plan by some members of NATO, I warned Western media at that stage that it was asking for trouble. Not only they denied us Membership Action Plan, but they specifically told the world that they are denying Georgia Membership Action Plan because of existing territorial conflicts in Georgia, basically inviting the trouble.
///////////
I saw my old professor Zbignew Brezinski say on TV today. “Now its inevitable that Georgia will get Nato membership.”
I think not. The French were wise to block this one. Saakashvili went on to say that because Georgia was denied NATO membership the Russians were encouraged to invade. ie the Nato verdict was self fulfilling.
Is Bush right to say the Ruskies shouldn’t be bullying their neighbors. Yes. Should be backing that up with treaty commitments that bind us to war. No. There are plenty of other levers the USA can pull.
As with the moslems the first duty of the next American president is to get the USA off dependence on foreign oil pronto.
That’s leadership.
I never did like the “Global War on Terror” label.
It has always seemed better to me to think of it as the globalization wars.
There are maybe four different competing visions at play.
Obviously, there are the jihadists who see a restoration of classical Islam as the cure for the ills of materialism. Universal in its pretensions and certain in its precepts, Islam is the water that will fill all vessels. (The problem is that Islam is poisoned by its contact with postmodernism and atrophies all of the civilizing “apostasies” that made it bearable.)
Then, there is the European Social Democratic model. (Probably very much in line with Bobbit’s thesis.) This envisions that the nation state will be subsumed into a higher order of international institutions which will mediate and equalize power relationships and the distribution of wealth. Eventually this will result in a Star Trek multi cultural utopia of law abiding and environmentally friendly happy shining people.
Impossible to overlook is the gravitational pull of the Middle Kingdom. China has regained her cultural confidence and has resumed her historical imperative to expand her periphery and slowly absorb all into the kingdom. Starkly utilitarian and unsentimental, there is no romance in China’s vision of the global future, only a slow and patient process of digestion, like a python.
What has been nearly the default model of globalization is the American Empire of liberal markets and pop culture regnant. America rarely resorts to military violence and does not practice the kind of punitive actions we see Russia engaging in. Most of her expansion is not even conscious. There was certainly no intention that Filipino insurgents would sing “Knock Three Times” as they marched. America’s reverie spreads through the world like a benign contagion. It was only in the aftermath of 9/11 that America began to realize that her cultural tendrils around the world belonged to her and that she had to protect them.
These are the four visions contending with each other, forming temporary alliances with each other, and mutating each other as the 21st century begins.
Ctulhu — Thug regimes that need huge amounts of thugs follow that pattern. Thugs don’t come cheap. Hence an emphasis on “real quick money” the way the Mafia operates.
The breakthrough in Asia was the construction of thugs on the cheap. China, Singapore, Malaysia, all had cheaper thugs allowing a degree of more long-term planning. I’m serious about that too.
Oh, what was the secret to thugs on the cheap in some Asian nations?
Nationalism.
The reality is that there IS no other option – in the long run.
Unfortunately, we live in the short run. The short run can have many many problems.
If that BCT pipeline is such a big deal why not detour it through Armenia?
Bobal,
Azerbaijan and Armenia are mortal enemies. (If you would have told me a month ago that there was going to be a war in Caucasus, I would have bet money on those two.) There’s no way in hell that the Azeris would allow it.
Dave;
I agree with you.
• America’s oil is much more expensive to drill and extract than much of our foreign competitors. We actually have plenty of it, but a lower market price will wipe out the investment in a lot of our wells, if we were to really do it. National security interests should lead us to have some sort of foreign oil tax/ price support system so that when the market price falls below a certain level, perhaps $50-60 a barrel, we support our domestic suppliers at that price. I’m a free market guy, but the oil market is not a true free market and we need to develop and guarantee our own supply of oil in this dangerous world.
• Pat Buchanan is a despicable ass clown. He makes his living being the “House Republican” that the Commie News Network and others trot out to show Unthinking America that all Republicans are racist, paranoid, fascist pigs. He is purposely a nutter. i think they pay him more to say deranged things like his Hitler was really a good guy rant. I know of people who really think all Republicans are really like him.
You’ve answered my question, thanks.
re: “supercargo:”
Russian disinformation (original or echoed, it’s all the same).
You are assuming several favorable assumptions:
That the “2 Russian majority” regions, presumably South Ossetia and Abkhazia, were actually “Russian majority” regions. Every reliable (i.e. non-Russian) source available indicates that Russian troops were already on the ground in those regions, that Russia had already irrevocably intervened in Georgian internal affairs via regular and irregular troops, plus extra-legal means such as the issuance of Russian passpords to non-Russians inside the borders of a non-Russian nation state (i.e. Georgia).
That Russian had the authority to “give” control of any part of Georgia to anyone, or to dictate a “trust”.
That Georgia unilaterally bombed these two Georgian provinces in an act of ethic cleansing. No credible source exists to support that premise, and to prove that Georgia’s military action was not, in fact, in response to clear Russian provocations.
Russian is a country of:
Crass, gutless low-lifes, who beat up and rape the helpless, but never have the guts to confront strength.
Or, a country of cowards who would let thugs like Putin own them, instead of fighting for their freedom.
Russia is a country with NO HONOR, NO JUSTICE, NO TRUTH. Who the hell cares what Russians think about “trust obligations”. At least 100 years of history tells the world all we need to know of Russian duplicity, arrogance, and practiced expertise in cold-blooded murder. EVERY RUSSIAN INVASION has been accompanied by a Russian claim to virtue. EVERY RUSSIAN invasion has been characterized by incompetent drunkards, rapists, the murder of innocents, AND a pack of lies to “justify” the course of action.
Your comment is an absurdity, to assume that this was anything other than a naked power grab by the same cowards, the same DISHONORABLE thieves and rogues who have run the Russian machine for over 100 years.
And in case my point is too fine to translate from English to Russian, I am a career military man – a professional. MY military is made up of the most innovative, resilient, forebearing, courageous, technically superior, and HONORABLE group of individuals to ever walk the face of this earth bearing arms. Perfect we are not, but we are not drunkards and rapists, nor we do not shoot or bomb indiscriminately. We care for our enemies and in many cases our enemies non-combatants, better than our enemies do for themselves. We WIN, and then we build hospitals, schools, churches and Mosques, and then LEAVE without so much as asking for thanks, let along the Russian style tribute.
Russia’s military WILL NEVER BE as effective as the USA; you will never hold a candle to us. Our junior officers LEAD by example, or senior enlisted SERVE their charges, and we have no conscripts – anywhere. Any junior enlisted American is show more respect during his worst day, than any Russian enlisted man will every receive from his superiors.
You may steal Georgia due to circumstances, but Russian will also wear that badge of DISHONOR for 1000 years. Every Russian man in uniform in or around Georgia will one day be embarrassed to even admit he was involved.
Ultimately, YOU WILL FAIL, and America will lead a new “coalition of the deserving”, i.e. former Soviet slave-countries like Georgia, who will take up arms to defend themselves against Russian aggression.
Paul in Hollywood: If you want people to produce oil for you, pay them for doing so. Basic free market principle.
I am not an admirer of John D Rockefeller, but he built the US oil bidness by assuring suppliers of income. Then the antitrust gurus took over and saw to it that increased production would mean loss of income. Business been going over there ever since.
Technically speaking, Pat Buchanan was correct some years ago when he stated that Hitler was not a threat. Neither was Tojo.
Rommel and Yammamoto however were of some concern.
In the Ivory Tower world Phil Bobbitt makes a case. But, the real world Bobbitt fails.
When you are in a Russian command economy for a long period of time and corruption is so bad that it is practically impossible to enforce a legal contract then criminal organizations flourish. Bribery and intimidation get things done.
Add to that is an ex-KGB guy running the country which has become flush with oil money then you have situation ripe for abuse.
It’s no stretch of the imagination that Putting wants to resurrect the old Soviet Union or something like it.
He has got the men, money and weapons. He sees the USA electing a weakling for President. So, he takes what he wants.
It worked in Georgia so why should it not work in Poland?
The more geopolitical uncertainty the more oil prices rise which helps Putting.
He has been arming his Iranian proxies against us. So far that has produced positive results for him in that he and his proxies have killed US soldiers with little repercussions.
I wonder if these blatant acts of aggression by Putin would have occurred if we had our feared cold war military including Gen. Lemay’s strategic Air Command in full swing. Maybe Putin would not be so quick to capture Georgia (or threaten Poland).
I would suggest that we take the military/economic battle very seriously. We must help our friends and punish our foes.
Whiskey; The Permian Basin at one time produced 2 million barrels a day. That has been cut in half. But with a price guarantee,
would be back to 1.5 million a day sustainable
for a century or more. And be there within the year.
As Paul noted, there is plenty there but the extraction costs are high. People have to go head over heels in debt to apply the proper techniques. Price declines/fluctuations can then threaten the very survivial of our domestic petroleum industry. Guarantee the income and things will improve.
The organization of societies into nation-states is a development that promotes democracy for many people. Language, religion and ethnicity are important factors in an individual person’s feeling that he can or cannot be a competent and effective participant in the decision-making processes of his government.
Ossetians in Georgia have felt they cannot participate as equals in their own governance because they do not speak Georgian well and because they are distrusted and dishonored simply because they have Ossetian names and other ethnic characteristics. This Ossetian alienation is based on long experience of dealing with ordinary Georgians, many of whom stereotype Ossetians as uncultured, criminal, anti-Georgian traitors.
It is difficult, but not impossible, to overcome such alienating attitudes. Certaintly the Ossetians and Georgians have failed to do so, even though many in the Georgian and Ossetian leaderships had the right intentions and capabilities. At a crucial moment, those leaders apparently lost control to radicals on both sides.
It’s important to keep our eyes on the ball, which is liberal democracy. Social organizations based on common language, religions and ethnicities can be positive factors promoting larger trends toward liberal democracy, but sometimes they can become negative factors too.
There is nothing inherently wrong when a person attaches his own loyalties to concepts other than language, religion, ethnicity or country. If someone perceives himself to be primarily a European rather than a German or perceives himself to be primarily a member of a new and developing supra-national order, he should not be dismissed reflexively as a fool. Each individual sees his own place in the world differently, depending on his own relationships, experiences and capabilities.
Nationalists don’t enjoy a monopoly on ability or willingness to deal effectively with the world’s current conflicts. In general, nationalists do some actions relatively well and some things relatively less well. The same can be said about inter-nationalists, supra-nationalists, religious believers, atheists, private entrepreneurs, public-organization officials, and so forth and so on.
These relative capabilities develop. It is true that right now there is no really effective military force commanded by any inter-national organization such as the United Nations or the European Union. It is also true that right now no nation-state, except for the USA, can project military force effectively more than a few dozen miles beyond its own borders.
We’ve seen all of this supranational and “end of history” nonsense before. Look at the calm of the mid-1800s in Europe which, except for the Franco-Prussian War, lasted until 1914. Similarly, Alexander I made the world’s first international peacekeeping organization in the form of the “Holy Alliance.” Even after WWI, there was the League of Nations.
All gone: Peace broken by unforeseen forces and international organizations and treaties broken by the interests of their own members. Conquest is the only thing which has ever united different countries.
When will people learn their darned history?
Seems to me there has to be some low limit on nation state size — or atleast the size/might of its military.
Subdivision into smaller and smaller nations — what remains had better be spending a huge percentage of GDP on defense. The last superpower can’t defend them all.
@whiskey:
We’ve got the perfect storm — third world men (not poor either), ambitious and hungry and angry at being denied families seeking either 72 Virgins or brutal conquest to satisfy their basic sexual-companionship needs, and consumerized Western men substituting video games and porn for a real relationship as they are priced out of the relationship market, unwilling to fight and die for a society that gives them convenience. But not their own family.
elsewhere you wrote:
The fallacy of the Market State fantasy is that the intellectuals never figure on people gaming the system. Cheating. Violence is the proven way to cheat and win. just look at Russia OR Iran.
Yep. Another dimension of reality that Santa Clausewitz didn’t address, or did he? I guess, to try to stay on topic , I’d say that mass online thuggery is a new and unpredictable phenomenon which is only tangentially related to national loyalties. The gamer-generations are perfectly unrooted in a nation, a people or a place, so they are easy marks for ideologues and religious [including secularisti] yahoos.
I see the power of a 4+ competing globalization scenarios analysis at one level, but noting the rootless masses of disconnected [male] gamers around the world as an identifiable factor, albeit an incalculable one. A world surfeit of eager freebooters, desperately seeking pirate bands to join.
@wretchard:
In keeping with my previous comment and trying very hard to be properly on-topic, you wrote:
September 11 and the Russo-Georgian war proved that neither the concept of religion nor nation is wholly dead.
So what happens when immense masses of internet-connected but socially disconnected young [male] gamers look for connection? Adherence to romanticised nationhoods or religion-hoods, or freebooter pirate bands.
Hmmm, sounds like Islam’s first 100 years. Ooops, sorry, make that Islamo-fascism’s first hundred. As for the pure Islam we dare not neglect, heck, I don’t really know about that one. I know there are many Russian individuals who are neither siloviki nor skinnie-brain hooligans.
God help us if the siloviki figure out how to really recruit and control large numbers of Russe gamers, some kind of latter day Cossack Hordes on a par with the present day Chinese Hacker horde[s].
The hacker horde[s]:
“Wii iz in UR market State OODA loop, BEBE. All UR base R bilongz 2 uss’nz
Time to finish this very pleasant dry Saperavi red. It doesn’t come close to the glory of the Kindzmarauli [WOW!], but Georgian wine is here to stay in my [somewhat disconnected but no gamers here--he's in college] household.
From a British point of view.
The actions of our 10 year socialist government have given away sovereign rule to the EU, -against the wishes of most of the electorate.
Our media have aided and abetted this, hiding it with continuous celebrity pap and skewed reporting of events.
The same thing is afoot in the USA.
A hard left Democratic president of the US is (astonishingly!) now a possibility.
What I can’t understand is how very wealthy people and corporations give money to the Democratic presidential campaign. Surely it is not in their best interests, given his true (forget the fluff) ideology.
Are these wealthy Democratic donors equivalent to the Russian new rich?
CALLING ALL who are knowledgeable about Georgian wine
Is this site broad enough to provide a good, independent overview of Georgian wine? …access to the majority of exporters?
http://www.georgianwines.info/
Wikipedia seems to have a well-edited and up-to-date article. Is it, really?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgian_wine.webloc
And,yes, there is substance to the claim that wine (and viticulture, viniculture) was invented in the Trans-Caucasus. It is also reasonably claimed that present-day Georgia reflects this immensely significant heritage of human development and wisdom.
To arms, winebibbers! The Motherland is under ferocious attack! (only half joking)…
I wouldn’t call Buchanan an asshat. He has done America’s political and intellectual debate a tremendous service in the last 10 years by keeping an open mind about history and – for a former Cold War conservative – being free of blinders.
He noted in an earlier column that America and most of Europe have about 20% of the population that think their system is working well, and leaders are taking things in the right direction. In Russia, the tremendously popular Putin is credited with Russia’s turnaround from corrupt crony capitalism and achieving order in Russia. His approval numbers and Medveded’s are in the 70% range, with 54% saying Russia is moving in the right direction. Brazil is slightly higher as it’s GNP rapidly grows, and China leads with 86% of it’s people stating they are quite satisfied with the leadership and direction of China.
Buchanan notes that while authoritarian capitalism has seeds of destruction, it works like nothing else can in getting an economic miracle. We saw the Meiji Restoration, the periods of American boom when all decisions on the economy were basically in the hands of 500 bankers and later railroad, coal, steel, and oil barons. China has had the greatest rise of all – averaging 11.9% industrial growth, 13% GNP growth PER YEAR for the last 16 years.
But Buchanan notes that Nazi Germany was no slouch:
In his 1937 “Great Contemporaries,” Winston Churchill wrote, “Whatever else may be thought about (Hitler’s) exploits, they are among the most remarkable in the whole history of the world.”
Churchill was referring not only to Hitler’s political triumphs — the return of the Saar and reoccupation of the Rhineland — but his economic achievements. By his fourth year in power, Hitler had pulled Germany out of the Depression, cut unemployment from 6 million to 1 million, grown the GNP 37 percent and increased auto production from 45,000 vehicles a year to 250,000. City and provincial deficits had vanished.
In material terms, Nazi Germany was a startling success.
And Hitler was given 85-90% approval in his democratic plebiscites, in what outside observors said were fair elections.
=======================
Now with Russia, Buchanan says we did everything possible to antagonize Russia after starting off far more intelligently with the Bush I and Clinton grace period, where America took pains to avoid humiliating Russia, rubbing their noses in it. From 1989 to 1994, to avoid taking advantage of their weakness to push our ideologies, taking resources from them, and aggrandize our power at their expense. That changed when the Congress changed hands and the bear-baiting started.
This is the exact opposite of what we did with defeated Germany and Japan after WWII – where we wanted their strength and dignity restored and avoided a pattern of post-war humiliations – and more like the ruinous Reconstruction after the Civil War and the punitive Versailles Agreement that ensured militant grievances and revanchism – and also ensured WWII would happen.
Blowback from Bear-Baiting – Link:
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=28053
Which has these central points: (1)But is not Russian anger understandable? For years the West has rubbed Russia’s nose in her Cold War defeat and treated her like Weimar Germany. (2) Rampant Western hypocrisy on self-determination (3) Americans have many fine qualities. A capacity to see ourselves as others see us is not high among them.
In a mafia-capitalism system, like Russia has become, if Putins’ politics are bad for business it may be worth a $100m hit to get rid of him.
The ‘end of history’ only recognised the ‘debate’ between capitalism and communism, and indeed 1989 was the end of that debate. Russia cannot fall back on the CCCP model, as it believes in nothing, other than cash.
@JavaThread:
Subdivision into smaller and smaller nations …. The last superpower can’t defend them all.
“Balkanization” The Supra-National State sucks the juices out of national states by splitting them into increasingly tiny pieces. This creates constant ankle-biting conflict which guts the nation-state and leaves only the supra-state as an agent available to “negotiate” “peace”.
“Peace!” “Peace!” … uh, right.
The world ends not with a bang, but with ‘scare quotes’…
paul:
“What I can’t understand is how very wealthy people and corporations give money to the Democratic presidential campaign. Surely it is not in their best interests, given his true (forget the fluff) ideology.
Are these wealthy Democratic donors equivalent to the Russian new rich?”
—
Those wealthy donors are part of the Progressive Vanguard. They have typically been educated at “elite” universities,and form a social, political and business clique, which is maintained via such self-reinforcing mechanisms as sweetheart business deals, incestuous hiring practices, favorable legislation, and rewarding their cronies from the public trough.
Obama and his cronies will know exactly how to reward their supporters and punish their opponents via the above referenced mechanisms… and that is not solely a democratic characteristic, it is a large part of the reason the republicans in the legislature are polling so low.
ie. The GOP is no different then the Dems and Progressives
so called “Crony capitalism” is actually “Crony Socialism” and is an excellent argument for the Libertarian vision of small effective government and balanced budget amendment to the US constitution.
A good example is the plundering of the semi-governmental entities Freddie/Fanny/Indy-MAC for political and financial gain.
–snip——
cedarford:
That changed when the Congress changed hands and the bear-baiting started.
This is the exact opposite of what we did with defeated Germany and Japan after WWII – where we wanted their strength and dignity restored and avoided a pattern of post-war humiliations –
——————-
The fallacy in this argument is that the US did not destroy and conquer Russia and therefore did not have complete military and political control of that nation, to enable the US to affect that type of reconstruction.
—snip——
Which has these central points: (1)But is not Russian anger understandable? For years the West has rubbed Russia’s nose in her Cold War defeat and treated her like Weimar Germany. (2) Rampant Western hypocrisy on self-determination (3) Americans have many fine qualities. A capacity to see ourselves as others see us is not high among them.
————
1) No it is not… post cold war the US attempted to boost the Russians by enabling democracy, engaging them in multilateral institutions, assisting their transformation to free market capitalism. Your implication that the “neocons” (we know your connotation) spiked all that is false.
What changed in the mid 90′s is that Vladimir Putin and his KGB clique began to assume the reigns of power in Russia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Putin#Early_political_career
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”
IndyMac was a spinoff of Angelo Mozillo’s Countrywide, not a semi-governmental entity.
“…mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable….”
continuing whiskey’s dialogue…
what do you do when someone cheats?
if you do nothing, the rule-abiding get trumped by the cheats…
if we don’t already, we need plans for various nefarious scenarios that might play out due to dips in the “gasser” curve…that is, mischievious activity should be not only expected but planned for on major dips in the price of oil…as the price of oil dips, the likelihood of outrageous behavior increases
as the world comes under globalization, there are some that need an “edge” of some sort, and this can be ssen on a sliding scale…
…from those that cannot compete at all without some form of rape and pillage, with utter disregard for the rule of law (nationalization, assassinations, intimidation, lack of investment, etc. – ironically, empowered by promises of a better life for the masses, while wealth is increasingly concentrate in the hands of a few elite – they’ve managed to turn the classless society inside out)
…to the rotten core, those apparent upright world citizens that have inner suspicions of market systems, and the openness they entail, and feel a little slyness, or gaming of the system is in order to assure they are not left behind; that, often combined with a national inner neurosis of some sort leads them to underhanded, less than forthright dealings with the other players, as demonstrated in the world bureaucracies of the day…
examples of the first are chavez’s venezuela, iran, and increasingly the wusski’s
a typical example of the second would be a european country whose zenith occured during earlier imperialistic times, and has a longing or earlier glory combined with an increase drive for superiority/competitiveness which might lead them to play the current situation to their advantage…
…as whiskey stated, as insecurities mount instincts steer such people to their clan…
…it is yet to be seen whether the EU, in their search for strength will turn to their wealthy neighbors to the east, that offer (fill in the blank…): more energy, more whites, more power, more byzantine plans, etc. with which to create an alliance…at once hamstringing NATO and relegating it to just another of the world bureaucracies to be played…
nationalistic groups will naturally flourish, with their leaders becoming increasingly popular at home (sounds like the 30′s)
the major mindset difference between the rules abiding core and the cheats is that those comfortable with market forces feel there is a great big pie out there of which everyone can partake, whilst those without the economic mainstream have fallen prey to their insecurities and feel they must guardedly protect their little piece of the pie…
the question remains, will anyone do business with the worst of these cheats? especially as they will desparately pay ever more for technology as they fall behind…
will market forces rectify their behavior? will sanctions work? will the EU interfere? will others remain quiet lest the flashlight be pointed in their direction to scatter a few of their own cockroaches?
order must be restored so that the world understands that there are still a few countries with their heads screwed on straight – that will prevail
there must be consequences…and what remains of the rule abiding core needs to have solidarity against these cheats in order for their behavior to be changed
Anyone seen accounts of Russian Logistics?
If not, aren’t we owed one by Wretch or Cannoneer?
—
3Case:
fedya informs me that “Angelo Mozillo’s Countrywide” is a Jug Wine not worthy of discussion on this forum.
Home, Hearth, Family and Self.
These are the only originators of rational self-governance.
The saying, “Think globally and act locally.” used to be a favorite of the West’s post-sixties progressives (along with “Free Tibet”). But, in retrospect, it appears that they never meant it.
That’s too bad, because the sentiment provides the template for maintaining a functional nation in an international environment that is caustic to the nation-state, while enlisting citizens with transnational leanings in the hearth’s, home’s, family’s and self’s defense.
The loss of the Left’s (and the Democrats’) allegiance to this homily bodes ill for the Last Nation AND the West’s individual-ist social order. Enter Obama.
3Case:
“IndyMac was a spinoff of Angelo Mozillo’s Countrywide, not a semi-governmental entity.”
once again, I stand corrected by you Fact checking bastards
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IndyMac_Bank
that said, the shenanigans at Countrywide and IndyMac are fine examples of the results of big government “Crony Socialism”.
“Last April, France opposed the American push to fast-track Georgia’s North Atlantic Treaty Organization membership.
………………..
I think the French were right. Thank You France.
Of course the French were right. They are impotent. Now instead of NATO which is slow, Georgia has America which is somewhat speedier. i.e. boots already on the ground, aircraft in the air and landing, ships in the Black sea.
Russia is dying. It has to expand or get carved up. I lay out some reference points here:
Well Calculated Moves
@ Konyok
Ah comrade Konyok you found me out. I do sooo thank you for assumming I am paid by GRU – NOT. And I can not be SVU, can I (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragunov_SVU)? Perhaps you meant SVR???.
It seems that you do assume that people who do not agree with things you think correct must be russians or ……….. iranians???
Just for you: “IMF staff judged Iran’s short-term economic outlook as “good” amid high oil prices that pushed currency reserves to $82 billion at the end of the 2007/08 fiscal year in March, from $61 billion the previous year. Reuters”
@ Ledger
Putin may threaten Poland but it seems you forgot that Poland belongs to NATO, so the overall situation is different than in Georgia case – Georgia does not belong to NATO.
Some of you folks have got it all wrong. It’s not foreign oil that we have to wean ourselves away from. It’s All Oil.
As long as we need oil we will need oil from Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Azerbaijan, Nigeria, Iraz, Kuwait, etc. But, it’s becoming ever more obvious that if we move rapidly toward biofuels, and electricity we really will be able to become self-sufficient.
Oil really is on the verge of beginning to go away, folks. We can lead the world into the “new” age; or we can spend the next twenty years fighting over a depleting resource. Our Choice.
There are only two things we can be sure of in this dimension, this life: the reality of evil and human nature. After that, you just never know. As a former “abstractionist” (those of us who were Marxists were indeed always looking at the tea leaves for how the Hegelian rhythms were playing out) I no longer try to intuit some larger pattern or trend is revealing itself.
Random and decisive events and people can change the trends of history in an instant. “What’s going on?” may just be an amalgam of these unforeseen events and people and the ripple effects they create in other lives and other countries, across many cultures.
And if Obama wins in November the waters get murkier and, I believe, the world becomes more dangerous, not less so. It will mean that the hard guys of the world are going to start taking chunks out of people and nations, because they know they can.
Sometimes it’s just that simple.
The problem with the End of History concept is that it implicitly assumed that there would be some maintenance going on.
When a doctor pronounces a patient well on the way to a complete recovery from a dangerous disease, he assumes that his medical advice will be followed, that the drugs he prescribed will be taken per the directions, and that the patient will not almost recover from pneumonia and then start snorting anthrax particles or ingesting botulism toxin.
This is life. I go to the store and buy food and then a week or less later have to do it again. I get the feeling sometimes that I will be buying food for the rest of my life. And if people did not take this approach there would be no history to end.
But some would prefer to view things as the “era” theory of history. Concepts come and go like hemlines and hair lengths. It just happens.
How many of you know that they took down all of the “fallout shelter” signs in government buildings over 10 years ago? How many know that they disposed of all those supplies of emergency food and radiation detectors they had stored away? How many know that the USAF shut down the Cheyenne Mountain headquarters of NORAD a few years ago and the place is now it is a big hollowed-out-piece-of-rock curiosity?
The times they are a changing. Back.
fedya,
RE: freebooter pirate bands @3:57 am
Buccaneer.com
ella,
Because of time zone differences, Starling was unable to respond in the previous thread due to it being closed out.
He may well be too much of a gentleman to post the response here, but being too much of a gentleman has never been one of my strong points and I also benefit from being in a time zone @ the opposite side of the Earth, so I will go ahead and post this, hoping we may all benefit from your response:
Starling Wrote:
—
ella said:
“cjm, Iran is not nearing total economic collapse, its economy is not good, but it seems far from collapse you are talking about.
Russia is not dying, too. Well, perhaps its birth rate is terribly low but it is not equal to overall dying. Stars are red, not white – just look at china. As for position to help or not to help – no one is going to help russia, on the other hand no one is going to make war on russia, particularly not European Union. I have feeling that you read too much of …… propaganda. Reading propaganda is not bad, on the other hand there is a thing like too much of a good stuff.”
****
One of the biggest challenges in learning other languages is that they can differ so markedly from one another in their grammatical structures.
One the most noticeable grammatical differences between the Russian and English languages is the lack of (in)definite articles (a, an, and the) in the former. This is why it is common for Russians speaking English to omit them from their writing and speech of English, as “ella” has done repeatedly above. Most native English speakers, as well as any other proficient ESL speaker, will easily spot from 3-5 articles that were omitted in “ella’s” 7-sentence (and poorly punctuated) post. That’s a very high error rate for a native English speaker. And given that the errors are characteristically Russian, I’d say Konyok was correct to suggest “ella” is one.
PS: “ella”, the stars in the Chinese flag are yellow.
FYI: google these four terms together- “article” “indefinite” “definite” and “Russian” – for some discussion about the role of articles in translating between Russian and English.
http://tinyurl.com/ellasgrammar
Doug, I don’t know a helluva lot about Russian Combat Service Support. Assuming they do business much like the Soviets did, the bulk of their trains will be ammunition (Cl V). When they have plundered all the gas stations in Georgia they will need Petroleum, Oil & Lubricants (Cl III). They will subsist upon the bounty of Georgian larders to the maximum extent possible, thus reducing their need for rations (Cl I), and they will despoil the Georgians of every drop of Cl VI they can find, and they have sharp noses for finding such prizes.
Their logistical tail will be much smaller than a Western army’s, so even interdicting the Roki Tunnel and the passes through the Caucasus won’t have an immediate constraining effect on their operations. Eventually they will base their logistics from a Black Sea Port of Debarkation and run their Main Supply Route to Gori. The heavy heel of the Russian boot will just dig deeper into the Georgian neck to make up any shortages.
“Soft Log” and Concrete Canyons: Russian Urban Combat Logistics in Grozny
Cannoneer,
That’s what I was afraid of.
That’s why it would have been nice to close the Roki Tunnel after about 10% of their contingent had passed, and direct the Georgians to take good care of them until Vlad could make arrangements to have them airlifted out.
Well, that, and a lot of even juicier reasons!
In 1994 the Russians attacked Grozny, the Chechen capital, as part of their campaign to stop the breakaway republic. The Russians had massive problems with the Chechens’ deliberate targeting of logistic units. The Russian logisticians were so inept at defense that, not only were Russian infantry units pulled back from the front to guard these units, but also many additional infantrymen were pulled out to fill in the unit vacancies.
RESULT: Logistic units had taken so many casualties, they were completely unable to accomplish their mission!
This discussion group has seemed to settle into the steady state belief that Russia exhibited perfidious behavior and “suckered” Georgia into attacking South Osettia so Russia could attack Georgia and this is proved beyond doubt by the observable fact that Russia was in position to react quickly to the Georgian thrust.
There is another scenario that fits the observable facts. Russia utilized good intelligence gathering and just plain common sense observation of the escalation of activities by the Georgians and South Osettians. They were ready because that is what good military commanders and staff do. And another observable fact is that the Russian military exhibited all the general characteristics of effective, well thought out military tactics and stategy.
Aether’s answer is correct and insightful. I am going to lift it and use it in my undergraduate course on political economy.
Do not confuse intellectuals with the puffed up professors of law and political science at the so called “elite” universities such as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford and especially Columbia. I have presented lectures on my work in social science at all of those universities and at universities abroad. At Columbia I encountered a group think mentality that we do not have at the university where I teach and research (a state university with a strong emphasize of football and student partying). Our undergraduates want to get a degree and get a good job and are not part of some social and political elite except at the state level for some.
I looked up Bobbitt. He is a senior lecturer at the University of Texas Law School, a second rate regional law school. He is NOT a professor. That may indicate that he is better than I think he is but I doubt it.
The problems with our research universities are more complicated than the critics on the right realize. Most issues in life are too complicated to be described by simple theories.
True intellectuals exist in our society but many of them are not university professors.
The counterterrorist operation in the Northern Caucasus turned a spotlight on a large number of problems in combat rear service organization. It showed in particular that combat rear services are vulnerable to enemy firepower while their mobility does not match the mobility of troops. Nearly all combat rear service equipment has low off-road capability; cannot negotiate water obstacles on the move or ensure maneuver with materiel and assets in areas of destruction, floods, or fires; and has insufficient capability to maintain and replenish material, especially ammunition, stocks, provide medical assistance and evacuate wounded and sick, and ensure loading/unloading operations.
The existing combat rear service T/O structure does not ensure the necessary flexibility and operation of subunits in terms of materiel and medical service without outside assistance. The lack of rear service T/O protection, guard, and defense subunits, engineer subutnis and antiaircraft subunits as well as air transport sharply impairs the operational effectiveness of the combat rear service system.
at the university where I teach and research (a state university with a strong emphasize of football and student partying). Our undergraduates want to get a degree and get a good job and are not part of some social and political elite except at the state level for some.
Just a very fast note to say I can attest to that. I have an Ivy League degree and a couple degrees from State universities including night school.
The only disagreement is that the partying was more intense with the Leaguers (excluding pre-med and pre-law which are their own species not to be disturbed). The night school set wanted employment and knew what they had to do to get it.
The difference I think is more age-related but the ivy-covered tendencies not to be dismissed.
Privilege meets the Dues Payers.
Some are beginning to think that this is the week that BHO jumped the shark.
Re: Comments that new energy inititives (drill, refine, dig, liquify and 4th generation reaction) are years away. Same commments were made years ago. Had we started then…
The point is we have to start. Yes the short term is now, but the long term soon becomes the short term.
all that education and the concept of “on topic” still remains illusive.
Russian forces destroy key Georgian bridge
Very impressive and helpful comments here (Whiskey, Cannonner, Konyok, others. Thanks. I was once infatuated with Bobbitt (Shield of Achilles is as artfully fashioned to a high finish as its eponym) but all that theorizing won’t stop a bullet. He was right, I think, about the fall of Yugoslavia being the unbearable contradiction for the Nation-States who muttered and blinked during this rape in the drawing-room of Europe. But where we go now is, I think, much less clear than even his multiple scenarios suggest. It all begins and ends with the individual; and when a culture consists of “loose affiliations of billionaires [actually of post-modern gamers]” there is small chance that it will miraculously rally around a concept like the Motherland. Which is not to say that Gamer States cannot act: they will and probably with greater volatility and viciousness and less understanding of the costs, than old-style statecrafters will. That raises the odds of disaster.
no cjm – not a liberal arts course in the bunch. all math and science.
where priorities are well a priority.
which yours are not.
but that happens with people who think so fast they can’t bother with the caps key.
It’s all cool.
Georgians doing forced labor in S. Ossetia
Woe to the vanquished.
North Avenue Trade School, 37 years age (One of those regional anomolies, a great school not in the north east or bay area).
Having read the book does not equate with understanding the book.
The frequent use of quotations from supposed (dead) thinkers to argue current events could lead one to assume an inability to integrate current facts on the ground and formulate ones own views.
The more complex and convoluted the theory the less likely it is true.
Putin (and thus must be fully expanded to include his support base) has needs, internal and external, mostly internal. He has limited resources. He is spending them to his best advantage, he hopes. We will see.
ago…keyboarding skills, not.
from the comments here, on other threads, it sounds like the russian people are inherently incapable of forming a true nation. they are like jackals, in the ecology of the planet. disgusting but necessary. if other countries won’t adopt and maintain a martial tradition, then they *deserve* to be consumed.
imo, war is the organizing principle of the u.s.a. too, but for different reasons. immigrants that join the military and serve with valor “become” Americans.
i can tell it’s all “cool”. why don’t you start your own blog and yak about yourself there? and you still aren’t on topic. lamer.
Whatever c.
Enjoyed my conversations of yesterday (& several weeks ago) but there’s always one in the crowd.
The operative word being “one.”
And I’m done.
Speaking of borderless indefensible worlds the washington post chose to honor edna st vincent millaytoday six decades after her death. They quoted from one of her more memorable verses.
“My candle burns at both ends
It will not last the night.
But ah my foes, and oh my friends –
It gives a lovely light.”
of her death the washington post said:
“Sometime in the dawn of an October morning almost six decades ago, the undoubtedly inebriated poet Edna St. Vincent Millay tumbled down these stairs, landing in a crumpled heap on the lower landing. Hours later her farm manager found her and summoned a local doctor, but it was too late. Her neck was broken, and she had died as fiercely and adamantly as she had lived.”
let’s look at the different ways to configure a society, in engineering terms.
what the new class seek to do, is create a highly stratified structure with little true connectivity between the layers(i.e. classes). it would cut across national boundaries, which would be nominal at best.
this design would be very suceptible to shearing forces, and would be highly inefficient since there is absolutely no motivation to produce extra, once the overclass had theirs.
a much stronger and more stable design, creates myriad and comples webs of connections, without clear boundaries. the people at all levels (except again, at the top) have every motivation and opportunity to produce as much as is profitable.
“if other countries won’t adopt and maintain a martial tradition, then they *deserve* to be consumed.”
New Europe needs to emulate Israel and soon. Why shouldn’t every Georgian have a Bushmaster under under the bed?
I guess we can be grateful to Pootie for weighing in on the global gun rights debate.
cjm
Engineering analogy does not work. Rebuttal would be way off OT.
Trying to stay on topic: You are assuming that an elite power class is doing intellegent design. I think elite, power, class and intellegent are mutually exclusive.
I believe we are observing nature, trying to understand the processes and develop the next paradigm (science, not engineering) from which we could develop an intellegent design. A design that will last a couple of centuries or so.
I like Anglo-shere reunification. Not as a super state but as the successor to the nation state. The 21st Century allows a geographic unity across oceans and connectivity of culture and language over the larger disconnected geographic expanse. (Still searching for a label…)
I believe the design could be an expansion of the US Constitution. (Good engineering technique here, building on known success etc.)
The idea is not completely formed and open to all sorts of discussion and clarificaion.
science without engineering; one hand clapping.
unfortunately, key members of the anglosphere are terminal; uk, canada, new zealand — r.i.p. the necrotic tissue must be excavated before growth can resume.
new world order: india, japan, singapore, poland, albania, bulgaria, el salvador, brazil, australia, georgia, colombia, israel, ukraine, romania, taiwan, mongolia, u.s.a., maybe baltic states.
unfortunately, no nation with a muslim population will be capable of participation. nor can any authoritarian nations.
OldSalt – from way above.
Wow. Very very cool, indeed. I love the smell of patriotism in the morning.
cjm
Your new world order has the seeds of other unit. My idea does not see just one extra national unit, more like a series of mergers to lower the number of units and thus reduce the combinations and permutations intanglements. Maybe 10 or so. Certainly no more that a couple of dozen. Some, China jumps to mind, are almost there as is.
I am reluctant to write anybody off, though. UK, Canada, Kiwi might need pruning. But UK at least has deep roots. Both Oz and India (I blissfully include India in the sphere) are vital and reach into the others. Like many weddings something old and something new.
Important to the process is the idea that the act of unification includes reconciliation of the administrative details. (Engineering) Groveling around in the details forces some house cleaning. I used this technique successfully in establishing ISO9000 Quality Techinques Certification programs a couple of times. We removed huge amounts of organizational inertia simply by asking why do we do this. In many cases we couldn’t even describe, in writing, what was being done. Those activities headed for the trash bin quickly.
ta
Re: Muslims. concur. Authortarian. Authortarain regimes cannot maintain control beyond a certain size and geographic continuity. Part of the up-side to the idea.
Wright said:
“…the thing that distinguishes us from right wing realists is to concede that we don’t really have the rule of law globally yet, but to think that we can move in that direction and someday we will have it…”
This reminded me of a story about a bunch of guys using a crane to pull a truck out of a river in Africa – all they succeeded in doing ws to pull the crane into the river alongside the truck.
To people who understood nothing about engineering, all the way through this process it looked as though they were moving steadily towards the state of ‘having the truck back out of the river’. For them, only right at the end did it become clear that this had never been true (and who knows, maybe even then they decided to blame an ‘implementation misstep’ by the crane driver, or a design fault by the American crane manufacturer, etc.). Someone who knew how a crane actually works could have at any stage seen at a glance what was going to happen.
Too often, it seems to me, problems with the left’s social engineering projects, both domestically and internationally, are no more complex than this. The results are just as disastrous, but that doesn’t seem to deter them at all. It’s like watching an endless loop of a movie in which a 4 year old climbs behind the wheel of a car and starts it up.
To arms, winebibbers! The Motherland is under ferocious attack! (only half joking)…
I tried to purchase a Georgian wine yesterday. Sadly, our major regional distributor, Beverages and More, does not seem to carry any at all. None. Perhaps we can suggest that they do?
the left is a parasitical class; all they excel at is enslaving other humans. after that, only wanking.
Nomenklatura
Well said.
cjm
Left doesn’t even enslave well…those pesky serfs keep getting out and stirring things up.
Long live the cloth yard shaft.
cjm: Several years ago I wrote to some friends
that there ain’t no sech animule as “the global economy”. What was and is unfolding is
a whole bunch of regional and even local economies that interact with each other at hitherto unprecedented levels and even in unprecedented ways.
The (self) annointed fantasize about how they will be in charge of their imagined unitary system. Sooner or later their fantasies will
founder on the shoals of reality. How much ancillary damage they cause is the question.
Just finished reading “End of History” by Fukuyama. My first impression was, doesn’t this guy know anything about sex? For it is biology that drives human nature, just like all higher creatures. For all living things, competition is the iron law of biology. Call me a social Darwinian if you must.
Watching the globalization effort of recent years, I think the proper model is free love. Now, I’m for as much free love as I can get (I’m a guy) but other organisms see sexual promiscuity as an opportunity to aid their species at my expense. Hence, AIDS and other diseases that see a perfect transmission method in our exchange of precious bodily fluids.
Likewise, once we lower our protections of our political, economic, and cultural values, entities competitive to those values will take as much advantages as possible. Hence, our need for a military, a border fence, and some economic reciprocity.
The nation-state evolved for a reason. it had its problems but we having yet come up with anything superior.
I believe everything in life that is human begins from perception to thought and thence to action. So, we gather in, selectively (as is our nature)what slams us in the face and then what is peripheral and supportive of the urgent things. Very few people take the long view, and even then the long view assumes we have some breathing room to look that far out. We are rational beings after all, but we are also reactive creatures primarily first focussed on survival. That’s the building block of human organization and action.
Good chess players take the long view of things (relatively speaking)and try to organize their environment/battlespace around delayed gratification. Unfortunately, most human beings don’t excel at delayed gratification. Capitalist economies reward those who delay gratification and work for longer goals, generally though not always.
Putin may or may not have a long range goal. He probably does, but events seem to be making him more reactive than he planned on being. The Czech Republic signing that deal with us to set up the tracking station for our missile defense shield, combined with the increasing probability that Iran’s nuclear weapons program will be attacked before January, I think, made him take more risks now.
Because of our limited ability to react effectively NOW, we have to construct a long term plan for how to deal with what Russia and Iran are doing. That would put the game in our favor, at the end. However, the wildcard that makes it difficult to plan is Sen. Obama and the good chance he could win in November. Because his victory changes EVERYTHING.
And that’s how fluid the world is, even at the personal level. That is why I no longer subscribe to overarching theories of history.
Cannoneer No. 4
Your posts on forced labor, unleashing the Cossacks too murder rape and steal, blowing up a key bridge linking the interior to the coast, ) and others seem to indicate Putin has resorted to an inhumane Czarist/Stalinist brutality unimaginable to the MSM. Russia appears to be absolutely destroying those portions of Georgia they control so there is nothing left to save.
Putin has played Bush and Condi. He has shown America to be weak and unable to protect her allies from inhumane destruction.
Putin’s objectives may not seem logical when viewed from the perspective of modern warfare or diplomacy. His behavior is probably purposely outside the norms of international conduct and a direct threat to the Pax American free world order if left unchallenged.
The object may be to just cripple America as the protector of last resort for the Free World. He has shown that Bush and Condi, and America can’t protect you if you chose to cross the KGB mafia state. Nations and their leaders must assess who has their back in a crisis. National security against such a terror will always be a top priority.
Many Americans were never taught, or have chosen to forget why America chose to be protector of the Free World. America cannot exist as an island. Like it or not we are dependent on others for critical national resources. America built after WWII, a free market and freedom based financial and political world order that greatly enriched ourselves as well as our willing allies to a level unforeseen in history.
When we fail to protect that free world order, severe problems arise. The rise in the price of gold and oil was an indicator of things amiss.Too many Americans, particularly leftist Democrats refuse to take up the role of protector. Economists and the Fed thought that the price rise of gold indicated an economic problem of too much money supply and lending. Partially it was, but primarily the rise in gold reflected political uncertainty of America’s role. America was choosing not to drill for its own oil and other resources. America has shipped much of its manufacturing capacity to the third world to pacify environmental wacko’s selfish perfectionist desire for absolutely no pollution on our homeland. Putin’s attacks undermine our role further. Our financial markets will not operate at anywhere near capacity where there is great uncertainty and Russian threats to commerce. There will be a huge price to pay unless we stop Russia now.
But Putin may feel he has to somehow succeed by his KGB backers definitiion. And unleashing a Terror can rattle an opponent, throw them off guard and force mistakes that can be exploited as earlier posts have suggested. It also sends a message to the other post Soviet States what could happen to them if they cross Putin.
Condi and Bush have been played. Allowing the Russians a 6 kilometer area to plunder, rape, steal, murder and enslave
Whitehall, remember the old expression “cleanliness is next to Godliness”?
Hollywood
Hollywood, (oops)
I disagree. The protection you desire, I assume military, is easier said than done. Logistics, as well discussed above, is what it is all about.
I guess our armed forces have made it look too easy. It isn’t. (another testimony to their skills).
Putin was pushed into this action by internal Russian issues not yet well known to us. He may have just castrated himself. It is much too early to jump on yet another America screwed up tirad.
For example, why can’t…never mind.
Rufusa: Wave your magic wand if you like.
Magically create a world in which petroleum is no longer needed for fuel.
NOW HOW IN H-E-L-L DO YOU REPLACE ALL THOSE PETROLEUM BASED ‘BYPRODUCTS”? Answer is that you don’t because you can’t. In order to keep the current human populace from a massive die-off caused by malnutrition and other forms of deprivation you will have no choice but to drill holes in the ground, pump out crude oil, and refine it. Do that or perish.
Then, pray tell, what do you do with all that gasoline and diesel you keep getting as an unwanted byproduct? Hmmmmm???????
In short, H Sapiens can neither do without oil
nor can he “run out” of it. The Earth is forming more of it as I write. Where, in what quantities and at what rate are unknown
at this time.
And while I am on this rant: Whaddya mean “no blood for oil”? I am quite willing to spill significant quantities of blood
belonging to those would forcibly deny me and mine market acess to petroleum etc. And my ire is in no way limited to foreigners.
Here is where you can buy Georgian wine on-line:
http://www.selectwinesllc.com/repofgeor.html
These prices are competitive with what I pay in my local liquor mart.
Here’s a list of retailers in NC:
http://www.sttoxml.com/sites/kst-georgian-wines/
(Yeah, a bit weird, but that’s what I found.)
Personally I really enjoyed Saperavi and found the Khvanchkara really interesting with an intense concentrated cherry flavor.
Here’s some background on the damage done by the 2 year old Russian ban on Georgian wine:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/may/30/russia.drink
(cjm), Michael Hoskins:… Canada… might need pruning.
I skipped the others as I can’t speak for them. UK’s Brown is taking a nap and Kiwis, ahm, well…
Yea, here in GWN, we have our share of moonbats. But so does US. I mean, it is still in the realm of possibility that Obamination will win elections in November. In that case, Harper would look like an ultra-conservative, not just a conservative. Canada does its fair share in Afghanistan, combat-wise, as opposed to wussfied, token contingents like Germans, for instance.
US deserters are extradited to US pronto–no safe haven for them. Canada would like to ask for the same courtesy, of course. Luckily, there were just a handful desertions from Canadian Forces in the last decade or so. It’s a small force, but very dedicated. It as subject to deep cuts in the last 20 years, but Harper is trying to rectify that.
If I weren’t such an old bag (way past the upper age limit), I’d sign up today.
Just sayin’.
consider each nation that is moving towards the NWO as an “organ”, specialized tissue. each performs it’s role in co-operation with the others, forming an organism that is much more than the sum of it’s parts.
those nations not directly participating are free to go their own way as long as they aren’t actively hostile. nations that are actively hostile will be set upon by the immune system’s leukocytes.
this is all self ordering and does not require anything more of each participating nation than to “fit in”.
eventually the leftists will have to be expelled from the host, perhaps relocating them to russia and the like.
there are many good canadians and i welcome them all here. they are a small fraction of the total population of canada, unfortunately. your armed forces have much to be proud of; thank you for your service in afghanistan and elsewhere.
2×4
Thank you. I believe you proved my point. I have great fondness for y’all, eh. (including a son-in-law).
I still believe in the anglo-sphere. But for your moonbats (who are approaching their sell by date)…and ours…we share way more than not.
BTW I am still awed by one of Canada’s snipers. Over 2000 yards. wow.
Paul in Hollywood: Correct. Putin is riding a kleptocratic tiger internally. Or is the tiger riding him? Willy-nilly he is pushed into ever more harebrained schemes for easy loot. Russia will change when there is a societal rejection of the notion that plunder equals prosperity.
There are times I would love to retreat into an isolationist shell. But I cannot. Every sucessful republic has become an empire in self-defense against envy. The USA has to become an imperial republic by both persuading and forcing others to adopt republican forms of govcernance for themselves.
Impossible? I think so. However, St Rita
is snorting at me for my lack of faith. I have learned not to ignore the old girls admonitions.
“Russia will change when there is a societal rejection of the notion that plunder equals prosperity.”
Russians would have to stop being Russian.
The Mysterious Russian Soul ™ considers destructive envy as a feature, not a bug. Ivan is not destroying Boris’ property out of malicious intent, he’s helping him cleanse his soul of wanton, superfluous desires. Being a spiritual helper of sorts.
Russia is not Western and will never be. Quarantine them and let them die slowly as best as you can.
cjm, I’d probably estimate it’s half and half, very close to the US distribution. The conservative half is not as vocal, naturally, as hey have jobs, families, to take care of. You know the story.
There is a demographic trend to consider. The moonbat segment is mostly hedonistic in their outlook and they tend not to procreate as much as the conservative segment. They were at their peak just a few years ago, but they are on their way to their swan song. It is also likely that a sizable portion of young moonbats (when due to infection, not a natural state) will get mugged by reality. You know what happens then.
True, them moonbats did their best to infiltrate some sectors, namely education. That is the same story whether you look south or north. Some people are taking matters into their hands and starting homeschooling wherever possible or not severely restricted by state/province laws.
I know I am somewhat on a tangent, but wanted to address the natural tendency to sweeping generalizations, will be back on topic next time I post.
Dave, anything that can be made out of oil can be made (easily) out of biologicals, plastic included. (see ADM/Metabolix.)
You’re right; the earth is “making oil” as we speak. The next batch should be ready in about 100 Million Years. Meantime, it would probably behoove us to look upon it as a finite substance that looks like it might be getting in short supply.
BTW I am still awed by one of Canada’s snipers. Over 2000 yards. wow.
Same, the guy has to have a super-computer in his brain!
OldSalt:
Re: Your 12:14 am post.
Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Konyok:
Buddy is right. Ella made only one good point. That we should ignore her post as it was propaganda.
Rufus, an odd thing is that the deeper you drill, the less traces of bio fragments you find. Some really deep wells (> 1500m) show no traces of microorganisms whatsoever.
It may be that:
a) There is a process of oil production we don’t know about, that is continuous and not related to biomass.
b) Oil is filtered as it seeps down.
The problem with the option b is that oil tends to rise up, not filter down.
Rufus, 2×4
What do you know about coal liquifaction? It is old technology (WWII Germany) but is in some use in South Africa as the SASOL process.
Isn’t it possible to improve SASOL by using a petroleum base as a solvent-catalyst thus creating a blended product at about a 50-50 ratio? (Forgive me if my lack of organic chemistry chops are too obvious)
thnx
o/t but to file with the info upthread re civil defense. I hate to see USAF disarray at this time –tho it may be just normal bureaucratic churn.
Wretchard,
You posit:
“Can a supranational association of market states ever come into existence without the emergence of an international elite which owes allegiance to no nation but to the world itself? Or put another, no allegiance but to itself?”
Assuming a beneficent elite presumes a complacent or suborned sub-class. In the case of the EU, it seems on it’s way to that state. In the case of the rest of the world (with notable exceptions), it would seem a stretch to move away from the typical nation-state.
Why is our analysis always Euro-centric? Wouldn’t it be best to analyze the ascending model, rather than the descending one? I specifically call the EU descending due to their inability to defend their way of life without making ideological compromises. That way lies descent if another model plays real-time in benefit to their own ideology. The relevant question to me is: “Are we on the path that the Euro’s are taking”? In my mind it (the EU) is in the descent. Abandoning a culture for a sociologists doctoral thesis of a “perfect world” that competes with the current hegemon (U.S.) in scale, but not model. They have lost without firing a shot in self-defense.
The fight is with our internal “doctoral thesis” elite, if we believe in our model, and the real-time player advancing his. The current situation in geopolitics just preempted the deep thought of a “better world” for the reality of the current one. It doesn’t blow the model, it just focuses the mind.
The End of History – how self-absorbing can a generation get…? I’m ashamed of my generation’s ignorance and inability to learn from their elders.
2×4:
This is way off topic, but I’ve got to say something. I’m not sure if you’re coming from a creation science perspective or Fred Gold’s theory of mantle sourced hydrocarbons, but the conventional wisdom in the oil industry is that oil and gas is generated by kinetic (heat and time) processes from denatured biotic material (kerogen) that no longer shows specific identifiable structural traces of microorganisms. (There are fossil molecules known as biomarkers that prove the thermogenic nature of most oils and are helpful in linking oil accumulations to their original source rocks.) This is a conventional wisdom that continues to discover and produce billions of barrels of oil
Michael, it seems unlikely that coal to liquid will get much traction. The plants are about 10 times more expensive, in terms of annual production, than ethanol plants; the process is an environmental nightmare, and you’re still dealing with a finite resource.
It’s, basically, just one of those things politicians pay lip service to to placate voters in states like Pennsylvania, and W. Virginia.
oil and natural gas are byproducts of internal processes within the earth’s crust. oil will run out when the earth’s core cools, several billion years from now. so yeah, let’s panic now.
I agree with DanM. March we do Kosovo independence, April 20 a Rus Mig29 shoots down a Georgian drone. By April 30 NATO is warning Rus to quit “stoking tensions” with Georgia –and on it goes until August ”suprise” attack. Some surprise, looking back. Where was our brain trust? Reading the model that says Rus has ‘too much to lose’ in the ‘eyes of the world’ to start a war? Yes, that was so, in that model.
And Turkey –practically begging EU, just a few months ago, not to officially chastise their modern Turkish state for the Armenian genocide of WWI (I not II), on grounds both technical and practical. But no soap, EU did the hit, and now look at it. Here we are, not just EO but USA too, needing Turkey most extremely critically, and on just the sort of foggy, emotion-laden, who’s-to-say issue, as amorphous as it is critical –except the previous transaction regarded something 100 years ago, and the current transaction regards a current emergency. Real-time vs the Past, which counts more? Was KGB behind the push to raise the near-ancient Armenian issue? Well, qui bono, but nobody but the EU made the EU so languidly arrogant.
Yes, Human Rights is an important issue –all the more reason to engage the issue intelligently, rather than theatrically.
Russian aggression, like the jihad, is likely going to, for the forseeable future, be just as reasonable as a storm blowing outside. We need weatherproofing, a sound structure, and see to the outbuildings on the floodplain.
…should add, we can also get a storm blowing ourselves –but –does EU want to bother?
Konyok, nope, no creationist perspective here. Simple fact that the deeper you go, the less biomarkers you find. >1500m, you have a hard time to find any… no let me put it another way–you won’t find any. As simple as that. The question is, why? What follows is a bunch of questions that put the conventional wisdom in doubt. It wouldn’t be the first time that the conventional wisdom may be not the most accurate paradigm.
If you want, I can dig up some papers that note this oddity, when I’ve time.
Michael Hoskins,
Reagan shut down the Synfuels corporation because it was a) a boondoggle, b) an embarrassing name for something in the government. At this point the technology has made progress and should be encouraged, under private ownership.
Paul from Hollywood,
Putin intends to go medievel on Georgia.
His hordes will plunder at will. Loot is part of the kontraktniki compensation package.
If the West and America lets him get way with it, Tsar Vladimir the Terrible will devastate Georgia, rounding up the military aged males for liquidation ala Katyn Forest. His Cossacks are dragging the young girls out of cars and homes by the hair and bundling them off to big men’s seraglios, concubinage in desolate Cossack villages, or prostitution in Dubai and other places.
They’re burning the crops in the fields.
They’ll be killing the cattle and sheep they don’t rustle.
They will do unto Georgia what they did to their Zone of Germany in 1945, with the object of so terrorizing and demoralizing and emascualting the survivors that they will never dare trouble Russia again.
And nobody else seems to have the moral courage to to a damn thing about it but whine.
Frau, Komm.
Back to the immediate Georgia vs Russia issue,
here is a BBC story about Saakashvili’s popular support:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7563891.stm
I’ve felt all along that Volodya’s demand for his removal was counterproductive. (Think the rabidly partisan Charlie Rangel coming to Bush’s defense when Hugo smelled the devil at the UN … )
Still, it is not a good thing if Saakashvili is *the* indispensable man. This is the road to cult of personality and dictatorship. I really wish the Georgians have a competent bullpen.
Right now the most urgent question is when international peacekeepers can get into position. Until they are in place, the Russians have a loophole to justify their pythonlike tightening on Tblisi.
@Cannoneer No. 4,
If we do this right then a few weeks before the American election we shall see 80,000 Russian troops cut off on the wrong side of frozen mountain passes, terrified of setting foot out of the camps they are hiding in and starving until they beg to be rescued.
wretchard:
Is my 11:05am message awaiting moderation because I’m in the doghouse, or because I came too close to advertising a business?
Cannoneer, that rape & pillage is not getting the MSM coverage it should. Coverage –with pictures –at even a tenth the level that the miscreant squad of Americans created at Abu Graibe is critical to fighting back. Do you reckon that Vlad’s timing included the knowledge that he’d get as close to a blackout as possible, due to MSM not wanting to hurt Obama’s prospects?
anyway, thank goodness for Fox –tomorrow evening, 8PM EST, a special, “The Angry Giant”. Tell yo amigos.
Konyak,
I had a couple of posts in Limbo land for a day on the old thread because they had youtube links. Now they seem to be released. Very strange and unpredictable. Advertising though is strictly Verbotten.
Michael Hoskins: Rentech Fully Patented. Carbon sequestered in process and sold as feedstock to diversify the cost-effective revenue stream. Etc. There is difference of opinion. As noted by many who deride the “military industrial complex,” the armed services aren’t going electric any time soon. Last I heard Rentech was working for a 20-yr supply contract with DoD. Regardless, it is cost-effective interim technology with the distinct advantage of long-term supply – exactly analogous to the hydroelectric energy supply that allowed the USA to mobilize and produce war materiel post-Pearl Harbor. After last week, the prospect of serious war this century – not the skimishes and kafuffles – but the real deal – just got more sobering. The USA Rentech and very effective South Africa application (They have 3 plants) is out there for the researcher to find.
2×4,
Well, yeah, the biomarkers get cracked out.
I like to tweak petroleum geologists by citing Fred Gold. It’s almost as much fun as watching Russians’ faces when I call Putin “Volodya.”
By definition, conventional wisdom is a target just begging for hard questions. (AGW *consensus* anyone?)
“Cannoneer, that rape & pillage is not getting the MSM coverage it should.”
—
Agreed.
Not exactly a modern, civilized, or endearing behavior, perhaps especially so when performed by proxy, adds a whole other layer of sleaze factors.
programmer:
They also had the PKK blow up the pipeline two days in advance, purely co-incidentally, of course.
slade,
You raise a really interesting issue.
We have been retooling our post cold war military for more flexibility in COIN and small wars situations. Now, will we have to u turn back to a conventional war making posture?
Since the terrorism/failed states problem isn’t going away any time soon, does this situation argue for developing a dedicated expeditionary security/peacekeeping/development corps? (If I remember correctly, wretchard had some terrific threads on this very subject a while back …)
What I’m getting from Google News about the rape and pillage is often from AP and Reuters stringers. Their use of local stringers in Iraq usually served to promulgate the propaganda of the Bad Guys there, but Georgian stringers are getting the word out on Russian, Chechen and cossack atrocities.
LifeOTM, they will just move to the Black Sea ports when the passes get snowed in. Doesn’t get very cold down at sea level.
The difference in our model is the ability to pick our elite. The basis of our system – a little revolution every once in a while is a good thing. This presupposes that their is a decent crop of elite, along with a LOYAL opposition. We apparently have 2 problems with our model.
their? sorry – there…
While looking up the word “razzia, which I think describes well what Putin is doing to the West, I found this video on the Cossacks. From February, 2006, I think.
They just look like reenactors. Putin allows them to wield real power.
“The only disagreement is that the partying was more intense with the Leaguers (excluding pre-med and pre-law which are their own species not to be disturbed). ”
—
Slade,
Kevin James was a Federal Prosecutor for 19 years prior to becoming a talk-show host.
From Oklahoma, he went to college in Texas, I believe, where his fraternity built a blender for Margaritas powered by a lawn mower engine.
Visiting schools divided into those that were and those that were not offended by it’s Carbon Footprint.
Gawd.. Wretchard, I miss the preview function…
Cannoneer, gets cold enough to have the Sochi 2014 Winter Games, so it isn’t Santa Barbara!
I miss the little trashcans.
“his fraternity built a blender for Margaritas powered by a lawn mower engine.”
priorities, priorities…
So Doug, was it SMU or UT?
Konyok – RE the conventional forces, I’ll leave that to the “big brains” but the simplest first cut seems to be convention, nuclear, or incrementalism of The Long War. What I do know with my average-size brain is that military defense is an absolute requirement in this century – in the context of the “soft power” advocates who – I interpret – thought that the arms could be quietly phased out.
Not quite yet.
The deeply ironic contrast between the “what is old is new again” theme coming out of the Baltics with the focus on negotiated solutions to conflict resolution. I do not oppose the conference table option but have enough memory of history to be deeply skeptical of the efficacy. The first post-war generation has no stomach for fight – the shadows of memory being long and deep. The second generation thinks the need has been removed. The third generation … is shocked to discover that there is drinking in this bar. Shocked.
“NOW HOW IN H-E-L-L DO YOU REPLACE ALL THOSE PETROLEUM BASED ‘BYPRODUCTS”? Answer is that you don’t because you can’t. In order to keep the current human populace from a massive die-off caused by malnutrition and other forms of deprivation you will have no choice but to drill holes in the ground, pump out crude oil, and refine it. Do that or perish.
Then, pray tell, what do you do with all that gasoline and diesel you keep getting as an unwanted byproduct? Hmmmmm???????”
—
Dave,
Coal will provide many of the byproducts, plus diesel, gasoline and methanol.
Since we have both (including truly large quantities of coal) we should be both drilling and digging.
Cannoneer,
They can move to sea lift to resupply if they have both port access to Sevastapol and free ground access across Ukraine to get the supplies in. If the Ukrainians close the port then as I read the map all the Russians would have is Sochi and Novorossiysk. Can they do the job?
Dan,
Pretty sure it wasn’t UT, since he’s always dropping put down jokes on them like real schools do to USC in Calif.
buddy – Turkey was kept out of EU because they’re Muslim and the Yurps didn’t want a bunch of Muslims trotting through their various countries without documentation. The genocide was a polite fib to cover their rational racism. If Turkey behaves itself in this current crisis and plays ball with the West, it would go a long way towards making them seem civilized and normal, and not crazy and Muslim.
2×4 – if Canada wants to be taken seriously as a political power-weight, you have GOT to get rid of those stupid human rights courts now. Same with Britain allowing Saudi’s to come into English courts suing everyone for everything in other countries. It’s stupid, you’re being manipulated and it’s really annoying to the actual smart people your systems are being used to attack.
I just figured it out. here is KGB’s plan:
Assume:
USA financial system enables USA military power, and USA first-ever socialist POTUS candidate will severely damage the former, severely weakening the latter.
Then:
Invade Georgia, play harsh, cruel, whimsical games with Georgian people, west-humiliating games, for several months.
Bring crisis to incredibly tense eve-of-destruction nuclear-war brink about two weeks before election.
Invite Obama — “Come To Moscow” –to treat.
Obama meets with Putin/Medvedev, they then hold beaming joint press conference –like Yeltsin & Clinton’s laugh-a-thon — announcing ”new relationship” –and Red Army immediately pulls all the way back over its own border.
American electorate, by now with nothing but Russia & nuclear war on its mind, is presented with a candidate who can make it all go away, and so elects him to president, and his party to full power in congress.
USA financial system falls apart under loss of confidence, under taxation, and under fiscally-insane green legislation, de-facto overturning of first amendment thru ”fairness doctrine” and internet control viz ”great firewall of China”, etcetera.
USA military power follows national downward path of financial, fiscal, monetary degradation, detaches from global system-order guarantor, pulls back to western hemisphere.
Eurasian/mideast/african oil reserves, amounting to what 75%, 90%, of globe’s, and lifting costs of a quarter of western hemisphere’s, ensures inability of western industry to compete, and lifestyle to maintain, and military power to protect landmass and population.
Political unrest in USA due to unhappy conservatives cause martial law, suspension of bill of rights, ultimately suspension of elections due to ”national crisis”.
End of individual liberty on Earth, beginning of something else.
What happy thoughts there Buddy.
well, we have to see it in order to stop it.
a ‘tell’ will be if MSM starts covering the war the way it covered Abu Graib. Esp NBC.
nah scratch that –that’s too nutz. NBC ain’t soviet. that’d be krazy.
Cannoneer,
You are at the top of your information service game! Thanks for the Cossack film link. There were a couple of other gems there, too.
What a rich vein of stuff! I suggest that everybody pour a nice glass of Georgian wine and watch these videos.
In one way it’s like a Rohrschach test. Our *progressive* friends would no doubt see parallels between the Cossacks and the Minute Men. American nationalists would see proof that the Russians are fanatics.
It does speak to wretchard’s questions about the nature of nation. These Cossacks seek an authenticity beyond the “Market Nation,” they are not satisfied with an identity as passive consumers of the products of modernity. They certainly don’t want to be counterfeit Americans.
Fascinating stuff …
Buddy,
If you were the unshackled Russia, wouldn’t you take that plan?
This leaves China and India. India checked by Pakistan, China checked by proximity for the near-term.
It ignores the long term, though. What’s to be gained by the destruction of the global economy? How does it ultimately benefit Russia?
On a more micro level, could Volodya be “blooding” his Cossacks by encouraging them to roam Georgia?
Relax Buddy, it’s more likely that has the tensions built up, the folk would look to McCain, considering him an old war horse, and experienced. I think you’ve been blogging to much the last few days, staying up late:)
DanM, new Big Dog. If you believe, as many do, that the globe has 100 years of oil left, well, we see that as a time buffer to develop alternatives. KGB may see it as a need for some major industrial continental ethnic cleansing.
Life the Russians can use any port in the Eastern Black Sea. Who is to stop them?
NahnCee,
Classic line “If Canada wants to be taken seriously as a political power-weight”
Do you know that in 1945 Canada had the worlds 4th largest Navy? They had the secret of the atomic bomb and chose to restore their virginity.
Bobal –you may be right. in fact, you are right. i just looked at myself. what an ass i saw.
buddy,
You’ve been doing yeoman’s work!
You are no pollyanna, but you always catch yourself before going over the cliff.
@Cannoneer,
The question is one of capacity. I do not see other facilities available to them. How much can they move if they lose Sevastapol and can the rail and port lines enable them to keep an army in place in Georgia over the Winter if they do not have the direct rail link? Postulating that some unfortunate event deprives them of the direct rail line between Sochi and Abkazhia. It seems a very fragile logistical chain for them to depend on after the mountains get snowed in.
March of the Cossacks
They don’t need much blooding. They’ve been busy in Chechnya and the Balkans for years.
Well Buddy,
It’s still an interesting path of discussion. One ass to another…..
Buddy,
You left out the part where O’s “dear old friend” Vladzco, having recently purchased US Real estate for a record $750,000,000, finds the gardening overwhelming, and sees fit to grant 3/4 of the acreage to the Obama Clan, w/the proviso that they keep the lawns mowed.
They won’t lose Sevastopol. They can quarter themselves upon the Georgian people, occupy Poti, they’re already in Sokhumi and Batumi.
Putin’s razzia will have accomplished his purpose by snowfall down on the flats, and the bulk of his horde will withdraw, packing their plunder out with them.
Gotta love those guys.
I’d think they’d just fly the supplies in. If there isn’t a decent airport, build one. It’s the Georgians might lose some weight during the winter.
Cannoneer can perhaps provide a link for your edification, al-Bob, concerning the sheer tonage, and volumn of supplies necessary.
Ruskies would go broke paying for Air Fedexvia.
I was going to ask you re, Energy needs to grow biomass via cultivated farming:
Have any figures on how many gallons or btu’s required per acre, per year?
I don’t see any more re-supply problem for Ivan than we would have with the same sized army in Cuba (aka “Koober”).
If the rooskies can’t figure out a way to supply those troops without that pass, they have no business being there, which, of course, they don’t.
If you’re asking me about biomass Doug, I haven’t a clue.
At present, all our energy needs are provided by Jihadis running human treadmills @ Gitmo.
The Ruskies would never sink to such inhuman depths.
biomass m’ass
Damn, Doug, you just made me think of something. Our logistics in Iraq and Afghanistan depend heavily on Aero Fedexia air cargo operations based out of former Soviet republics flying ex-Soviet aircraft. Putin could outbid us, and they’d deliver to whoever is paying.
Yeah, you only farmed for what, 40 years, al-Bob?
(I forgot, your English degree did not include inculcating the definition of Bio-Mass into your cranium!)
I don’t think they’d shed their pride of honoring all such commitments to us so easily, Cannoneer!
Life
Is this map better?
“Obama meets with Putin/Medvedev, they then hold beaming joint press conference –like Yeltsin & Clinton’s laugh-a-thon — announcing ”new relationship” –and Red Army immediately pulls all the way back over its own border.”
Too “deus ex machina” (or should I say “Obamessiah ex machina”) for the average voter. You need some indication that things are going in a certain direction (like the 6 years before Clinton’s candidacy.)
Instead we’ve had the opposite. Years of polonium poisonings, murdered journalists, botched hostage rescues, etc. It would be a really bad movie, and the average American knows one when she sees it.
Biomass is what sticks up out of the blue water after chow.
Portapotties. 122 F. And pray that an HCN wasn’t in there before you.
Lessee, six years before the Clinton candidacy, Ollie North in the box, sweating, as the US congress excoriates him for interfering with Kerry, Harkin, and Brezhnev client Daniel Ortega.
Fox reporting Georgian reports of more rus stuff coming in country, even as spearhead falls back. also new, ”russia-backed separatists sieze 10 Georgian villages and a power plant”. Also headline, “Iran refuses six-nation offer of incentive package”. Also, “Egypt reminds Iran what happened to Saddam when he wouldn’t be forthcoming to west on WMDs”. Google news on ‘egypt’ search reports high level meetings among Egypt, Saudi, Jordan, GCC, etc ongoing.
Ukraine offers West radar warning
Russia’s new nuclear challenge to Europe
Headquarters United States European Command
DoD News Briefing with U.S. EUCOM Director of Logistics and Security Assitance
Wretchard has started a new thread.
for all the chicken littles, sober and not — who would you trade places with? if you are going to tell ghost stories by the campfire, at least make them good stories. absolute nonsense.
it’s just gaming, cjm –trying to brainstorm the possibilities –what what the various visions might be –what the other side might be thinking –gotta dig around a little bit –
The Russians are starting to act and verbalize as if Zhirinovsky were running things. Next thing you know, they might be demanding Alaska back.
cjm:
oil and natural gas are byproducts of internal processes within the earth’s crust. oil will run out when the earth’s core cools, several billion years from now. so yeah, let’s panic now.
Any petroleum geologist would say what you say is drivel. Especially about petroleum. There may be a case of extra-biological origin of certain methane reservoirs in the crust, but not many. Some formations thought to be ancient, pre-life methane containing and been disproven by radioisotope analysis (not that that discourages many believers, as a good bulk of them come from the “Jaysus gave Amuuricaaa endless oil”, and disbelieve radioisotope dating because it threatens the veracity of the 6,000 year-old Earth.)
Supply-side ideologues who talk up endless human population growth as great for the planet and GNPs, about endless fresh water, arable land, strategic metals and minerals, and magically refilling oil reservoirs – are sucking hard on their crack pipes.
Cedarford, I agree with everything you say there.
right, it’s all dead leaves and dinosaurs. guffaw. you do love the sound of your own voice. experts say what they are paid to say. you’ll know when oil is genuinely in short supply, because the russians won’t have to create false shortages to cover for their incompetence. concentrate on my mis-spellings, that’s your best bet.
“it may be worth a $100m hit to get rid of him”
While tempting, you may not realize the hell that would unleash.
Doug:
I was going to ask you re, Energy needs to grow biomass via cultivated farming:
Have any figures on how many gallons or btu’s required per acre, per year?
—————————-
I gave some yields in a previous threat /07/24/the-seen-and-the-unseen/
when we were discussing the viability of using poppies for oil in Afghanistan
—————————-
Cedarford said:
“Sorry Dave, that’s mildly deranged. Poppies are not a viable oil source or able to make “exciting ethanol source” even.”
I beg to differ.
Yields in gal/acre:
corn 18
hemp 39
soybean 48
safflower 83
sunflower 102
peanuts 113
opium poppy 124
rapeseed 127
olive 129
oil palm 635
source:
http://journeytoforever.org/biodiesel_yield.html#ascend
—————————-
Someone spent some government or utility(EPRI) funds making biodiesel out of blue-green algae. I think the cost was $2.50/gal.
C4 quote included for sniping purposes.
the thing is, google was started by a jew, so c4 won’t use it.
“programmer:
This discussion group has seemed to settle into the steady state belief that Russia exhibited perfidious behavior and “suckered” Georgia into attacking South Osettia so Russia could attack Georgia and this is proved beyond doubt by the observable fact that Russia was in position to react quickly to the Georgian thrust.
There is another scenario that fits the observable facts. Russia utilized good intelligence gathering and just plain common sense observation of the escalation of activities by the Georgians and South Osettians. They were ready because that is what good military commanders and staff do. And another observable fact is that the Russian military exhibited all the general characteristics of effective, well thought out military tactics and stategy.”
Half right.
Strategy masterful, though based on a number of false premises, resistant to change, and thus dysfunctional, but insightful into the nature of their opponents – marks about ninety out of a hundred.
Tactics, or their execution, are questionable, but apparently net effective if not efficient. Marks passing.
Likewise, once we lower our protections of our political, economic, and cultural values, entities competitive to those values will take as much advantages as possible. Hence, our need for a military, a border fence, and some economic reciprocity.
The 92 chemical elements are unevenly distributed around the earth. If you want a modern industrial economy locally it must trade globally.
BTW I love the ignorance of non-engineers when it comes to economics. They have no idea where their wolfram comes from or why it is needed. How about osmium? Or platinum? Do you realize that without platinum there would be gasoline shortages?
A modern industrial economy is a global economy.
nichevo,
Russia has a 500 year history of failing at grand strategy. It fails to make friends of those it conquers. It only knows the stick. It has no carrot.
supercargo:
the point is not whether we understand your side. the point is whether you do as you are told.
given the gruboye nature of communications by Russian decision-makers, from frontline generals to the foreign ministry, this is how things must be explained to you.
we have a saying: if one person tells you you’re drunk, to hell with him. if six people tell you you’re drunk, maybe you should sit down.
“Dave:
Whiskey: Cut our refiners some anti-trust slack: Let them guarantee $80 to $90 a barrel for ANY AND ALL crude oil—-or similar refineable substance produced in the USA or contiguous states and guarantee that price for 30-35 years. ”
Do you really think there is much danger of prices going much lower anytime soon?
oil will be down to $10/bbl within 10 years, because its only long term usage is for simple lubrication and plastics. you’ll notice we no longer use animal droppings or wood as primary energy sources.