Just one thing, I find the issue of possible FSB complicity in the Moscow apartment bombings to be very troubling. As for Nord-Ost and Beslan, Russian incompetence made things worse, but I certainly don’t suspect them of false-flag hostage-taking.

Just brutal hackery. Pump in fentanyl – cool, though not sure it worked quite as fast as advertised – but what kind of @#$%^&*(! morons don’t have the antidote on hand?!?!?!?!?eleven? And won’t tell anyone else what was used in time to do anything about it?

And for fairness, I have posted elsewhere that NORAD needs an enema, not to mention the US intelligence failures, yada yada.

I must insist, however, that this Georgia affair cannot be confused with a terrorist hostage crisis response. Classical naked Great Game aggression jack-move IMHO.

…

OTOH my cousin, a lefty lawyer and former politician (Cedarford’s wet dream, you have no idea) disagrees somewhat; I quote from a recent email:

Too long to go into in length.. S. should never have moved troops into S Ossetia. Q was did we give him green light to do this. Putin has several objectives–mostly keep US from meddling at his borders. Between missile defense and NATO issues of encirclement. Were we probing what P’s line in the sand was? P will make it clear that he is in charge, try to overthrow S. Don’t know if he will actually invade Tiblisi and do it physically. We have no leverage here.

Sigh. Not totally 100% night-is-day wrong, but bad enough. This is Columbia and Harvard and the Democratic Congress talking. And has traveled to the region on business. Not a moron in the low-IQ sense, far from it, I fear.

Stop crapping on Bush, this is what he has to deal with. And yes, it is wiser to have a senator (McCain) playing attack dog and Bush the voice of reason. Rhetorical satisfaction a la Bush ‘speaking truth to power’ is not the point here, gents.

Or we could just go to the nukes right here and now. That work for everybody?

Right, that’s what I thought. What some people here confuse with a vigorous response is really more in the Russian style.

…Fletcher, your phrasing is awkward, but I agree the concept of X Prizes for energy technology breakthroughs (as you have cribbed from Jerry Pournelle) is fundamentally sound.