The nearest thing you'll find to a Time Machine is Shorpy.com - a photo blog that - I warn you - will suck you in. The images range from the earliest Daguerrotypes to the 1970s. The comments that follow the images are often very insightful. Some posters even look up census data to try to find out what happened to the subjects! These pictures also made me realise that Hollywood hasn't done a very good job of portraying the 1920s in particular.
On the same theme, photos of old soldiers who fought in the Revolutionary war!
In the other Georgia, another bank fail. Friday is becoming known as "FDIC Friday". If you hear your bank's in trouble, don't leave it until the weekend to get your cash, is my advice.
Wa-a??? Kim Jung-Il died in 2003.This would be tinfoil-hat territory, but for the credible person making the claim. I report, YOU decide!
If true, the implications are potentially vast. Among them: former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s summit partner during one or both of his landmark visits to Pyongyang in 2002 and 2004 was not Kim himself but a dummy—the stand-in Shigemura claims has been fooling the world for at least five years.
Just when you think the Brits have plumbed the depths of awful politicos, they reach down and scrape another human abortion from the bottom of the political barrel. Up this time from the fetid depths, hanging from a stick like the afterbirth of a cow, dangles David Miliband - the man who would be the next Prime Minister (God save England). This preening martinet struts onto the Ukraine stage, and proceeds to - wait for it - threaten Russia!
Well David, seeing as how North Sea oil production is falling off a cliff, and the UK gets ever increasing amounts of its energy from Russia, I'd think twice before puffing up your chest and pretending to be Winston Churchill. If I were you, I'd pray for a mild winter - and learn how to say "I'm sorry" in Russian - in case PLAN-A fails...
NOTE: "David Miliband" makes nice anagrams. I like: BAD INVALID DIM
At the beginning of the year, 90 banks were on the FDIC watch list. There are now 117, FDIC chairwoman Sheila C. Bair announced at a news conference this afternoon. That is the highest number in five years, but some analysts expect the list to grow even more in coming months.
"I think there's going to be a steady drip, drip, drip of bad news," said Sean Ryan, a banking analyst with Sterne Agee. "We've only seen the very tip of the iceberg in terms of bank failures."
Even though only nine banks have failed so far this year, Ryan expects that to quickly climb with more than 100 failures before the end of 2009.
"I fully expect the FDIC insurance fund to be depleted," Ryan added. "The FDIC is going to be one of what is going to be an increasing string of government bailouts."
Thanks Uncle Duke for the following clip (ye filthy bastard!):
Yesterday I posted about the mysterious black helicopters flying over Portland. We've got a discussion thread going about it at the latoc forum. (I'm a mod there - you'll see me posting as "dermot"). This is legit, and has been verified by mulitiple sources. FYI - Bush Snr. hates this city, and has described it as "Little Beirut". It's one of the most left-wing cities in North America...which lead me to describe these reckless fly-overs as "Operation Hippie Mindfuck".
NOTE: I think this is just the usual 24/7 US Govt mindfuck crapulence - however, one of the new posters found something quite sinister. A Harvard Stanford study on the effects of a 10 kiloton terrorist bomb on an American city. The sinister thing is that up to page 8 the pdf shows the effects on Washington DC, but on page 9, the map strangely becomes Portland, Oregon (and IS NOT NAMED AS SUCH). Here it is, as it appears:
I've marked my approximate location with the X...two blocks North of Alberta, about 5 blocks West of 33rd. What to make of this? Like I said, most likely it's a mind-fuck. In the event of this lovely city disappearing in a flash of light, I thought I'd be wise to post this as a posthumous "Fuck you GWB".
Sometimes us animators find interesting snips of information. "My Medicated Cartoon Life" has a blast from the past from 2001:
Actually, it was in Germany last time I was there too - in 2001, just after the Trade Tower attack. The only radio station in English I could pick up was one for a local US Army base. They had a news story saying that the US Government had found definitive proof that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the attack. I came home wondering why nobody at home seemed to be reporting this - the Army radio seemed so sure. They weren't reporting it as speculation. It was fact.
It was only years later that I realised the Army radio station was priming their troops for an attack as far back as then. They had always just been waiting for their excuse to put the invasion in motion. And they found it.
Quite a title, eh? “The Pain Game.” That really says it all. The author is supposedly talking about how a Georgian insurgency could “pain” the Russian army in this Aug. 14, 2008, piece, but he may as well be cheering the unimaginable pain that such a course would inflict on the Georgian population. It’s that childish callousness that makes this such a classic of Neocon prognostication: “Why don’t you Georgians start a guerrilla war against the Russians? It’d be fun!” Fun, that is, for Koehl, in his living room. Koehl’s advice to the Georgians is almost unbelievable in its stupidity. Like a typical Tom Clancy fan, he reduces the problem to hardware, starting with a long, loving list of the armored vehicles the Russians are using, followed by a list of U.S. weapons that will supposedly neutralize these vehicles. Then, getting really excited, he fantasizes in true Clancy style about how a few cool new weapons can force Russia out...
...What’s most dismally typical of Neocon thinking here is the mad nonchalance with which this suburban hobbyist urges Georgia to let itself in for the sort of slaughter that has been going on in Chechnya for years. The Chechens have lost a substantial part of their total population in a losing insurgency. And the Russians didn’t defeat the Chechens by tinkering with this or that weapons system; they went in and kidnapped, tortured and killed all the young males they even suspected of being insurgents, just like we’re doing in Iraq. That’s how this kind of ugly war is fought. So prescribing guerrilla warfare means telling the Georgians to start a process that will lead to the death of most of their families. That’s what insurgency means.
I strongly suspect that Dolan is, in fact "Gary Brecher" - that being an alias. Brecher's written identical critiques of Clancy and the hardware obsessed maroons of the far right many times.
Here's an excellent article on "The Gospel of Consumption" - it argues for a 6 hour work day/30 hour work week. It's all worth reading, but here's a nice clip:
...in 2004, one of the leading legal theorists in the United States, federal judge Richard Posner, declared that “representative democracy . . . involves a division between rulers and ruled,” with the former being “a governing class,” and the rest of us exercising a form of “consumer sovereignty” in the political sphere with “the power not to buy a particular product, a power to choose though not to create.”
...According to this elite view, the people are too unstable and ignorant for self-rule. “Commoners,” who are viewed as factors of production at work and as consumers at home, must adhere to their proper roles in order to maintain social stability. Posner, for example, disparaged a proposal for a national day of deliberation as “a small but not trivial reduction in the amount of productive work.” Thus he appears to be an ideological descendant of the business leader who warned that relaxing the imperative for “more work and better work” breeds “radicalism.”
It's not as though I wake up and think: "I'm going to find the most depressing stuff online today." Sometimes, it just happens that way. Anyway, doom-alert ahoy:
Goodchild: Transition Silliness. A critique of ecovillages and "transition towns" as realistic coping mechanisms for Energy Descent. Discussion here.
Goodchild: Sorry, no gas. Very long, very grim prognosis for The World.
J.M. Greer: The tempo of change. A more positive view of collapse - though Greer still expects a new Dark Age a hundred years from now. In the doomerverse, he's regarded as one of the optimists!
Britain's bunkers are rusting into ruins. Ironic, for a country that's so paranoid about the threat of terrorism that it's turning itself into an Orwellian police state.
Freaky: Intel's wireless electrical system. Trasmitting electricity through the ether? Very spooky. I'm off to my Faraday cage, to make a tinfoil hat...
Each month, California inmates process more than 680,000 pounds of beef, 400,000 pounds of chicken products, 450,000 gallons of milk, 280,000 loaves of bread, and 2.9 million eggs (from 160,000 inmate-raised hens). Starbucks subcontractor Signature Packaging Solutions has hired Washington prisoners to package holiday coffees (as well as Nintendo Game Boys). Confronted by a reporter in 2001, a Starbucks rep called the setup "entirely consistent with our mission statement."...
...Windows dressing: In the mid-1990s, Washington prisoners shrink-wrapped software and up to 20,000 Microsoft mouses for subcontractor Exmark (other reported clients: Costco and JanSport). "We don't see this as a negative," a Microsoft spokesman said at the time. Dell used federal prisoners for PC recycling in 2003, but stopped after a watchdog group warned that it might expose inmates to toxins...
...A stitch in time: California inmates sew their own garb. In the 1990s, subcontractor Third Generation hired 35 female South Carolina inmates to sew lingerie and leisure wear for Victoria's Secret and JCPenney. In 1997, a California prison put two men in solitary for telling journalists they were ordered to replace "Made in Honduras" labels on garments with "Made in the usa."
Some light relief:
Innocent Londoner harassed by cops in a random search. They look through his possessions and threaten him with arrest, in a brave attempt to save us all from terrorists. And how does this ingrate reward the men with the shiny boots? HE SECRETLY FILMS THEM! Such an example of doubleungood behaviour must be punished. Take the citizen to room 101!
Another amazing account of DHS clowns abusing travelers. What's even more depressing than this article are some of the comments that follow, particularly this one:
As I am active in Second Life, I'd suggest a Second Life event, and if there is interest here, would help to organise it too.
Yeah, cause nothing scares fascists more than a bunch of geeks staging virtual sit-ins from behind their computer keyboards. (I include myself in this, btw). You want change? You'd better start pounding the streets and doing things in REAL LIFE, not SECOND LIFE. Stop buying crap. Boycott corporations. Take your money out of your banks. (No interest? Boo hoo!)
Nothing else is going to work (hell, none of that probably will either, but at least it's REAL).
Have you heard that there's enough oil in Alaska to supply the United States for the next two centuries, more than in the entire Middle East, but a government plot is keeping it underground? If so, attribute it to Lindsey Williams, a kind of oil evangelist, who's been making these claims since the 1970s...
...Now consider reality on Alaska's North Slope, the oil area that includes the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. It can take two or three years to drill a single exploratory well there, because such drilling is only possible for a few months at a time in the winter, when the permafrost is frozen hard enough to support equipment. Meanwhile, infrastructure can be transported there only by ship, in two or three summer months. To drill permanent wells, oil companies lay down a thick gravel "pad," acres in size, which allows for year-round drilling, by keeping equipment and housing safe from summer thaws and preventing them from melting the permafrost. Pipeline corrosion problems have been extensive. The EIA forecasts that if Congress opened up ANWR, it would take eight to 12 years to even start production.
Does this sound like a place that will produce more oil than the Middle East?... The EIA estimates that about 10.4 billion barrels of oil can be recovered from ANWR, just over a year of American consumption. Saudi Arabia alone has about 260 billion barrels of proven oil reserves. The verdict here: Get real.
The worst of the global financial crisis is yet to come and a large U.S. bank will fail in the next few months as the world's biggest economy hits further troubles, former IMF chief economist Kenneth Rogoff said on Tuesday.
"The U.S. is not out of the woods. I think the financial crisis is at the halfway point, perhaps. I would even go further to say 'the worst is to come'," he told a financial conference.
"We're not just going to see mid-sized banks go under in the next few months, we're going to see a whopper, we're going to see a big one, one of the big investment banks or big banks," said Rogoff, who is an economics professor at Harvard University and was the International Monetary Fund's chief economist from 2001 to 2004.
There are no military installations in the city of Tskhinvali. In fact, there are no military targets at all. It is an industrial center consisting of lumber mills, manufacturing plants and residential areas. It is also the home to 30,000 South Ossetians. When Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili ordered the city to be bombed by warplanes and shelled by heavy artillery last Thursday, he knew that he would be killing hundreds of civilians in their homes and neighborhoods. But he ordered the bombing anyway.
There was no "Battle of Tskhinvali"; that's another fiction. A battle implies that there is an opposing force that is resisting or fighting back. That's not the case here. The Georgian army entered the city unopposed; after all, how can unarmed civilians stop armed units. Most of the townspeople had already fled across the border into Russia or hid in their basements while the tanks and armored vehicles rumbled bye firing at anything that moved.
What took place in South Ossetia on August 7, was not an invasion or a siege; it was a massacre. The people had no way to defend themselves against a fully-equiped modern army. It was a war crime.
In less than 24 hours, the Russian army was deployed to the war zone where it chased the Georgian army away without a fight. Michael Binyon put it this way in the London Guardian: "The attack was short, sharp and deadly---enough to send the Georgians fleeing in humiliating panic."
Indeed, the Georgians left in such haste that many of their weapons were left behind. It was a complete rout; another black-eye for the US and Israeli advisers who trained the clatter of thugs they call the Georgian army. Soon vendors on the streets of Tskhinvali will be hawking weapons that were left behind with a mocking sign: "Georgia Army M-16; Never used, dropped once."
American hardliners are the first to say that they feel stupid next to Putin. Victor Davis Hanson wrote on August 12 of Moscow's "sheer diabolic brilliance" in Georgia, while Colonel Ralph Peters, a columnist and television commentator, marveled on August 14, "The Russians are alcohol-sodden barbarians, but now and then they vomit up a genius ... the empire of the czars hasn't produced such a frightening genius since [Joseph] Stalin." The superlatives recall an old observation about why the plots of American comic books need clever super-villains and stupid super-heroes to even the playing field. Evidently the same thing applies to superpowers.
The fact is that all Russian politicians are clever. The stupid ones are all dead. By contrast, America in its complacency promotes dullards. A deadly miscommunication arises from this asymmetry. The Russians cannot believe that the Americans are as stupid as they look, and conclude that Washington wants to destroy them. That is what the informed Russian public believes...
A few days ago I made some comments that Putin was playing Chess, whereas the Americans are playing tic-tac-toe (or American football, in the case of the smarter ones). Spengler has a better analogy:
Think of it this way: Russia is playing chess, while the Americans are playing Monopoly. What Americans understand by "war games" is exactly what occurs on the board of the Parker Brothers' pastime. The board game Monopoly is won by placing as many hotels as possible on squares of the playing board. Substitute military bases, and you have the sum of American strategic thinking.
America's idea of winning a strategic game is to accumulate the most chips on the board: bases in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, a pipeline in Georgia, a "moderate Muslim" government with a big North Atlantic Treaty Organization base in Kosovo, missile installations in Poland and the Czech Republic, and so forth. But this is not a strategy; it is only a game score.
Chess players think in terms of interaction of pieces: everything on the periphery combines to control the center of the board and prepare an eventual attack against the opponent's king. The Russians simply cannot absorb the fact that America has no strategic intentions: it simply adds up the value of the individual pieces on the board. It is as stupid as that. But there is another difference: the Americans are playing chess for career and perceived advantage. Russia is playing for its life, like Ingmar Bergman's crusader in The Seventh Seal.
There is a ton of amazing information in that article about the democraphics of Russia. Their population falls by 700,000 people a year - which is shocking. A Muslim majority is expected by 2040-2050. Would a Muslim Russia go to war against a Spanish US?
National Geographic: 9 page article about soil erosion, and mitigation.
I've been cleaning up some of my "doomer" cartoons. I'm trying
to integrate my Cintiq into my daily work a bit more. The problem is my inherent
laziness. Anyhow, here are a couple:
Remember all the right-wing bleating about the invasion of Afghanistan "liberating" the women of that wretched country? Yeah; the US/NATO/UN backed regime is sending women to prison for up to 20 years - for being raped. Your tax dollars at work.
A fuel crisis is the last crisis most would not expect in the world’s largest oil exporting country. The northwestern city of Ar’ar already facing a diesel shortage for the last month is now faced with a shortage of fuel.
Some nine owners of fuel stations filed complaints to the Ar’ar Chamber of Commerce and Industry against Saudi Aramco for not supplying enough fuel to meet their needs, Al-Hayat reported.
Big Brother watches you, even when you drive. The reader who submitted this link wishes to remain anonymous. I can't say I blame him. Nobody wants to end up in Room 101 with rats chewing on their faces.
Bob Brannigan launches his new blog with an excellent analyis of modern consumerism: Pondering the Endgame
The goal of consumerism is to reduce an individual, or limit a developing individual to a developmental stage somewhere between infancy and adolescence, thereby limiting or eliminating any opportunity for true self-actualization.
In the ongoing, frantic drive for ersatz success, parental responsibilities have been neglected or ignored, and influence from the extended family has been greatly reduced. Through these multi-generational actions we have all but lost any contact with, or access to, key values and knowledge which will be critical to our upcoming survival needs.
Further, reduction or elimination of these positive parental influences has severely impaired the very capacity needed to expose and counteract the above fantasy world. Indeed, once the first generation that is in a state of arrested development starts parenting, the process is almost self-sustaining. We have lost our culture of symbiotic mutual self-interest.
Once the link between material acquisition and so-called fulfillment is forged, the consumer is placed in a never-ending destructive cycle, resulting in sustained discontent, emotional imbalance, and often depression. As the victim is rarely able to discern the error in the underlying premise, correction of this psychopathy often requires professional treatment.
True social interaction, the sense of self-worth and the sense of place that comes from existing in a community has been largely lost.
Consumerism has achieved a Nirvana where shopping is now a recreational activity in and of itself, irrespective of any real need or the means to support the purchase.
The American banking system may not need a shove from Russia to fall on its face. It's effectively dead now, just lurching around zombie-like from one loan "window" to the next pretending to "borrow" capital -- while handing over shreds of its moldy clothing as "collateral" to the Federal Reserve. The entire US, beyond the banks, is becoming a land of the walking dead. Business is dying, home-ownership has become a death dance, whole regions are turning into wastelands of "for sale" signs, empty parking lots, vacant buildings, and dashed hopes. And all this beats a path directly to a failure of collective national imagination. We really don't know what's going on.
When I ponder our curiously unbalanced civilization, able to put golf carts on Mars but unable to equal the verse of muddy Elizabethan London, I wonder why we are as we are. In all things technological the United States is magnificent, the Athens of solid-state physics. Yet the great orchestras die unlistened to, we have no Shakespeare or Dante nor notion why we might want them, and religious expression grows mute, or crabbed and hostile. Why?
I think the answer is that our surroundings determine not just what we think, but what we can think. We live in cities urban but not urbane, among screaming sirens, in air grayed by exhaust and wracked by the blattings of buses. The complaint is not invalid for being trite. I cannot imagine a Whitman composing in a shopping mall.
The rush and complexity of everything take their toll. As a people we might well be called The Unrelaxed. And, therefore, the Uncontemplative.
Watching too much television weakens your grasp on reality on many levels, and that over-reliance on scripted, dramatic outcomes is a key factor in Americans' drift into fantasy.
It is a human weakness that we seek simplistic answers to complex puzzles. Astute correspondent U. Doran recently sent in a humbling list of common flaws in human thinking: List of Cognitive Biases.
On top of these potentially crippling natural biases toward group-think, self-delusion and fantasy, we have a literally endless stream of dramas in which some resolution is reached in two hours, an hour, or perhaps even 22 minutes (the other 8 minutes of the programming slot being reserved for consumptive propaganda, i.e. adverts).
Consider the key features of all television drama. Most importantly, there is always an explosive dramatic "problem" or obstacle. The solution/resolution will either require explosions and violence, a tense stand-off, or some equivalent high-stakes emotional compression and release. Settings which never seem to go out of favor are seething hotbeds of life-and-death drama: hospitals, courtrooms, criminal/police matchups, etc.
Even comedies and so-called "reality shows" follow the same script of ramped-up drama and cathartic resolution. The only difference is the resolution is supposed to be humorous and touching (some thin veneer of self-realization/self-knowledge is popular--"awwww, see, he found out something important about himself") or some decision by other parties is imposed/announced: you win, you lose, you're off the island, you're guilty, you shouldn't have torn the heads off her Barbie Doll collection, etc.
I went on a roll with this one. Here's a permanent link to my animation rant below, for those inclined to share. It's not often that I wax poetic.
A FEUDAL LORD SEEKETH ANIMATORS.
Animators/Artists/Designers will appreciate this risible job posting. (UNPAID)
By this Friday afternoon (5/30), we need the following:
1. We start from a shot of a character's hand with a blue-footed booby on it (we will provide the initial hand shot), and the camera pulls back very slowly away from the earth to reveal galaxies and the universe, all the while following the bird as he flies into infinity. This shot will last approx. 3 minutes.
2. We need a fake time-lapse sequence of this same bird hatching from an egg and growing into adulthood. Would prefer for the background/environment to look like time-lapse, so we'd need the lighting changes of days passing and seasons changing, over the course of a year. Keep in mind that his feathers will have to go from baby chick feathers to adult ones, through several molting stages. Perhaps growing and dying flowers in the foreground, to signify the time passing? I don't know if there will be time for that.
3. We need a shot of the Transformers fighting, but we will change their faces a bit. Similar style to the movie. Also refer to Narnia as a reference (the robot parts, not the animals).
These shots will have to be photo-real in order to match the rest of our film, which is photographed with a film camera. I still don't know much about computers or animation, but I assume we need someone with a good familiarity with Photoshop, or maybe Flash or Shockwave Director.
The fact that they would think nothing of posting the job quoted above, for NO PAY, is a perfect illustration of why I loathe the animation industry, and want to get out. These kinds of posts are NOT UNCOMMON. The assumption that kids out of school or out of work artists will do ANYTHING is a disease that needs to be stamped out - most urgently.
Having explained my inchoate feelings of rage to my therapist, he advised me to seek solace from Thalia, my Heavenly muse, through the art of Poetry. Thus renewed with vital purpose, I rewrote the job posting, giving it some historical context:
A FEUDAL LORD SEEKETH ANIMATORS.
ARISE, ye students, and work for free,
Accept this honour: to toil for me.
Worthy vassals, good and true -
Here line up, and munch my Pooh.
I your Lord, am good and kind,
And seek to guide thy simple mind.
For whilst thy hands are nimble quick,
I do not doubt thy wits be thick.
I'll have ye sketch a hand and boob,
And onwards! though ye be a noob,
Thy labour shall outshine the good,
The greatest ones of Hollywood.
SO COME, ye knaves, and tarry nay;
The deadline is three days away.
And tho' thine hours be full of sweat,
I shall ne'er be in thy debt.
There is one gift I can bestow: Put the work in thine portfolio."
Whilst this is an extreme example of incompetence, the mindset is all too similar to many animation "producers":
* No comprehension of the artistic aspects of the medium.
* No comprehension of the tools/technical aspects of the medium.
* No comprehension of the labour involved, or its true value.
* NO respect for the artists...whom they regard as "wrists".
* An Ayn Randian belief that only executives are truly creative.
The fact that the majority of truly successful animated series (The Simpsons, for example), have been created by cartoonists or artists is beyond them. These shows, however, are the exception. Most people I know have spent their entire careers working on Shr Dreck.
This is one reason why ludicrous buzzwords become so viral in Animation/Design studios amongst the producers (though rarely the artists)...a desperate need to distract people from the fact that THEY DON'T KNOW WHAT THEY'RE DOING. As soon as a fad comes along, they all jump on the bandwagon, shouting the Holy Words like a mantra. "Break the Fourth Wall" was one of the more irksome crazes at Disney Interactive circa 1997. Let's make sure to "Break the Fourth Wall". We broke the fourth wall for about six months; then we broke the bank.
I've seen it happen over and over - a constant quest for the "magic bullet" - the amazing New Thing that will allow the artists to finish the product for HALF THE PRICE. (Hint: it DOESN'T EXIST). But woe betide you if someone invents a marginal method to improve things slightly (linear, not exponential). We'll call this thing a FlangeBlaster. Within DAYS every fucknuckle in a suit will be Flangeblasting you until you're blue in the face, waving it around like King Arthur with Excalibur.
"Hey, can we Flangeblast it?" "Yeah, just have the wrists Flange the thing. It'll be done by Friday." "Flange Flange Flange Flange Fla Fla Fla Fla Blaster......." "FFFLLLAAAANNNGGGGEEEEE BBBLLLLLAASSSTTEEERRRRRR!!!!!!!!" "Please Kill Me. I yearn for the sweet release of Death."
Often, artists are in a separate lower caste to these Brahmin producers (and are even lower than writers on the scat-stained totem pole). Needless to say, they are paid accordingly. The artists are also unable to rise to producer status, having no creativity - that being a monopoly of the self-ordained Producers.
We, gentle reader, are shitmunchers. We munch their shit. They tell us it's chocolate, but nobody believes them - except for the young ones with the bright eyes.
The eyes aren't bright for long. Soon even they must realise the awful truth: that terrible thing sliding down your gullet isn't fair-trade low fat chocolate, harvested organically by buxom Guatamalan peasant women. No, it was squeezed from the puckered sphincter of your boss, freshly laid that morning. There are still undigested lumps of corn in it.
People wonder why 99.99% of the content of TV shows (live action and animation) is unadulterated shite. Every second artist/designer has ideas light years ahead of most producers. We all know co-workers who've had the contents of their portfolios ransacked by Studios for concepts - which are slightly altered, making them "original". Hooray for Hollywood!
Bastards.
This is why the phrase "the invisible hand of the market" makes me shudder. I've felt that hand, slowly and carefully smearing excreta over my face. To Hell with the invisible hand, where it can join the screaming soul of Adam Smith, clawing desperately for a moment's respite from the flames - a respite that shall never come. And rightly so.
Artists Unite! No return to Feudalism without a return of the Guilds!
FOOTNOTE: If you're worrying about the job posting and the studio who asked for it, fear not. A kind-hearted animator came through for them, and did the work ON TIME and ON SPEC. Here it is:
Operation "Drunk Monkey" is in full swing. (Again, note that really nasty gash on his right elbow):
No, ossifer, I'm prefectly sober. What d'ya mean, step out of the car?
This completely disproves the stroke theory. I don't think stroke victims can make faces like this. Pity his wife and daughter. They're crying - and dying - inside (like all good Republican women).
Why do I want to give Bush's daughter a big hug, and tell her that everything is going to be alright? (It's not going to be alright, of course, but I still think the poor lassie needs a big hug and the sweet placebo that is False Hope).
Segway into DREAM SEQUENCE:
"Boo hoo." She cried, her chin turning to dimpled Jello.
I patted her on the shoulder. "It's alright, Babs. Everything's going to be alright."
"I'm not Babs. I'm Jenna."
"Are you sure?"
"I...I think so."
The apple - far from the tree, I thought. I gave her a big hug. I hoped she wouldn't smell the liquor on my breath. Might remind her of Daddy.
"Anyhow, B ... Jenna - you can cry now."
"OK. WaaaaAAAaaaAaaaaA..."
Poor kid, I thought, as her tears and mucus soaked into my manly shoulder. What bloody chance did she ever have, with Chimpy Bomsalot for a father? She'll never be able to take a holiday in the Middle East - not without a Burkha, anyhow. In a very real sense, she's worse off than one of those kids in Iraq who had their arms and legs blown off by cluster bombs.
Life can be so very cruel.
I'm so glad Bush kicked the Dems out of the Whitehouse. He's restored so much of the dignity that was lost under Clinton.
Ugh. I hates tattoos on women. Hates them. Nasty! Mister Preznit - make them stop!
BBC: Russia losing propaganda war. Well, du-uh. The US media mindfuck machine (formerly known as the MSM, and which I will hereafter refer to as the MMM) is the greatest propaganda weapon in the history of the World.
The Bush administration appears to be trying to turn a failed military operation by Georgia into a successful diplomatic operation against Russia.
It is doing so by presenting the Russian actions as aggression and playing down the Georgian attack into South Ossetia on 7 August, which triggered the Russian operation.
Yet the evidence from South Ossetia about that attack indicates that it was extensive and damaging.
The BBC's Sarah Rainsford has reported: "Many Ossetians I met both in Tskhinvali and in the main refugee camp in Russia are furious about what has happened to their city.
"They are very clear who they blame: Georgia's President Mikhail Saakashvili, who sent troops to re-take control of this breakaway region."
Human Rights Watch concluded after an on-the-ground inspection: "Witness accounts and the timing of the damage would point to Georgian fire accounting for much of the damage described [in Tskhinvali]."
This time, drought has put Hashilan pond near extinction, in a way that according to officials many of the pond fishes are dead and other species are on their last breaths as well.
Hashilan pond is located in 26 km northwest of Kermanshah in Alahyar Khani village on the foothills of Khoorin and Veis; with an area of 450 hectares, this is one of the beautiful environments in western Iran, according to the environment correspondent of Iranian Students New Agency (ISNA).
But unfortunately the latest drought has pushed this valuable pond near extinction and has caused an environment disaster in the region.
Last week, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had just announced record losses, and so had most reporting corporations. Unemployment was mounting, the foreclosure crisis was deepening, state budgets were in shambles, and massive bailouts were everywhere. Investors had every reason to expect the dollar and the stock market to plummet, and gold and oil to shoot up. Strangely, the Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 300 points, the dollar strengthened, and gold and oil were crushed. What happened?
It hardly took psychic powers to see that the Plunge Protection Team had come to the rescue. Formally known as the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets, the PPT was once concealed and its very existence denied as if it were a matter of strict national security. But the PPT has now come out of the closet. What was once a legally questionable "manipulator" of markets has become a sanctioned stabilizer and protector of markets.
Alert: US Mint suspends sale of gold coins. Possibly because they don't want to sell them for $780, when there's a good chance they'll be a lot higher than that in the near future.
Now for the scary part: the world is running out of the raw materials used to make televisions, laptops, mobile phones and many of the other digital gadgets of the 21st century.
An article in New Scientist magazine last year quoted Mr Reller as having said the Earth has 10 years left of indium, which – although only one gram of it is used in a 32-inch liquid-crystal display (LCD) television – is absolutely essential to the screen’s clarity. Indium is also used in the windows of aeroplanes and trains. The metal’s rarity has driven up its price. In 2003, the metal sold for about $60 (Dh220) per kilogram. By 2007, the price had shot up to more than $1,000 per kg....
...Among other metals the Earth is running out of are gallium, also used in mobile phones, and which, with indium, is being used to make a new type of ultra-efficient solar cell; platinum, zinc, copper, nickel and phosphorous.
Environmentalists hate modern flush toilets. Mixing feces with 16 gallons of drinking water and flushing it into the ocean or river is pretty dumb. Now, we have a solution to the problem of shit that's even dumber than that - barbequeing the poop with PROPANE. What, gentle reader, do you think this abomination is called? Satan's shitter? Beelzebub's Bowl? No, of course not. It's called
That's right, because incinerating shit (instead of composting it) is the GREEN thing to do, according to corporate goons. God almighty, unleash thy deadly plague, for we are truly doomed.
Why is everybody mad at AIPAC? Everybody, I mean, everybody that’s heard of it, which means maybe five percent of Americans. Apackers are simply patriots, earnestly trying to do the best they can for their country, which isn’t the United States. I’d do the same thing, if I were one of them. I mean, everybody buys Congress—big pharma, the military companies, the teachers unions, anybody that wants anything pays Congress to do what it wants if it has enough money. I’m surprised they don’t have advertised sales. I guess AIPAC can buy them too.
Why aren’t people mad at Congress instead, which does what The Lobby tells it to? AIPAC isn’t supposed to be concerned about the good of the US. Congress is, and isn’t.
What I reckon is: AIPAC figures it’s helping Israel, but I gotta suspect it may be Israel’s worst enemy. Think about it. Israel is a tiny little country in a bad neighborhood. Everybody where it is hates it. Greater Israel is full of Hay-rabs that hate it, and getting fuller. Does this sound like a recipe for a happy ending?
I remember what a friend said about Phnom Penh during the siege: “It’s hopeless but not critical.”
You’d figure under those circumstances the Israelis would go back in the ’67 borders, try their damndest to get along with the people next door, and thus stay Jewish, which was the point of the thing in the first place. It’s probably their only shot. But they aren’t going to do it.
No. They gotta bomb everybody they can reach, and keep building apartments on Palestinian land, which is why Greater Israel has pretty much turned into South Africa or the US in 1930. Looks to me as if we’re gonna have fewer and fewer Israelis holding down more and more Hay-rabs so they’ll have to be meaner and meaner to do it until the whole shebang falls in. They want this?
For such an athletic man, it's a little sad if you can't get to your seat without six burly arms to assist you... (note the expression of the guy in the top right with the beard. I'm guessing he's a tea-total puritan. Also note the Asian man with specs to the left of Bush - is that Mandarin disdain I detect on his inscrutable visage?
I don't know what kind of pills Laura is on, but I WANT SOME! (I've always had a thing for Laura. She is quite appealing, in a spooky kind of way).
Take a look at Bush's right elbow. That's a nasty bloody gash. Another accidental fall, W? Not to worry though, Dubs - while you were smacking volleyball players on the ass, President Cheney was covering yours from his underground bunker.
Drunks, fools and liars: Georgia's current President is losing it.
It was a claim that could have provoked a dangerous Kremlin response: The United States is readying to take over airports and ports in the former Soviet republic of Georgia.
The claim, by U.S.-backed Georgia President Mikhail Saakashvili on Wednesday was swiftly shot down by officials in Washington, who denied any such designs on Georgian soil.
Yet, it was the latest in a string of overstated pronouncements by the American-educated Georgian leader that are further fueling tensions with Moscow...
...On Wednesday, he said in an interview on CNN that Russian troops were "closing on the capital, circling," and planning to install their own government in Tbilisi.
Associated Press reporters in the area saw no sign of an impending coup. An AP reporter saw dozens of Russian trucks and armored vehicles heading south from the central city of Gori in the direction of Tbilisi, but they later turned away...
...He later said on Georgian national television that the U.S. arrival of a military cargo plane with humanitarian aid "means that Georgia's ports and airports will be taken under the control of the U.S. Defense Department."
Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell responded, "We have no need, nor do we intend to take over any Georgian air or seaport to deliver humanitarian aid. ... We have no designs on taking control of any Georgian facility."...
...In his Wednesday TV address, he said, "Russia has lost more airplanes than in any conflict of this scale since 1939." While such figures are not publicly available, the calculation seemed unlikely given how brief the fighting has been and how uneven the two countries' forces are.[THIS HAS TO BE THE UNDERSTATEMENT OF THE 21ST CENTURY! This maniac is suggesting that Russia lost more planes over Georgia in the last few days than it did in all of World War 2!]
He also cited rumors that Russia was planning to bomb a rally in Tbilisi on Tuesday. The rally ended peacefully.
Saakashvili insists he's not overstating anything, and lamented Wednesday that the West ignored his warnings that Russia was planning a military operation in Georgia as "exaggerations."...
...He has long been derided in Russia, where he is seen as a vassal of the United States as it seeks to expand its influence in Moscow's backyard. The conflict has made that worse. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev indirectly referred to his Georgian counterpart as a "lunatic" on Tuesday.
No argument here.
Ooh; another photo of the other Great Leader:
Pst - it's the wrong way around. The ugly old shit on the bottom left will explain.
I don't know about this story, but it's spreading virally - it alleges that Russia has moved tactical nukes into South Ossetia (Why would they need to do this? To move their nukes FIFTY MILES CLOSER TO THEIR TARGETS? OMFG!!!). The source? A US Colonel interviewed by Amy Goodman on "Democracy Now" (two reasons to doubt the veracity). I couldn't find any other items on google. So, major health warning on the trustworthiness. I apologise if I'm wrong, but this reeks of Propaganda:
Col. Sam Gardiner notes, in an interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now, Russia has deployed tactical nuclear weapons to South Ossetia. The SS-21 Missile launchers are relatively weak compared to bombs that have already been used against Georgia by the Russian air force. However, this move does indicate Russia is potentially upping the game from a conventional weapons war to a tactical nuclear weapons war. Gardiner notes that at a news conference on Sunday, the US Deputy National Security advisor has noted these weapons arriving in South Ossetia.
Wired confirms, sort of - but the story still reeks. These missiles have a 100 mile radius, and no mention of a nuclear payload. By the way, Bush has a missile defence system that he'd like to sell you...as well as a new Cold War.
Georgian officials accused Russia of sending a column of tanks and other armored vehicles toward Kutaisi, the second-largest city in Georgia, then said the convey stopped about 35 miles out.
"We have no idea what they're doing there, why the movement, where they're going," Georgian Prime Minister Lado Gurgenidze said in a telephone briefing. "One explanation could be they are trying to rattle the civilian population."
The U.S. said a move toward Kutaisi would be a matter of great concern, but two defense officials told The Associated Press the Pentagon did not detect any major movement by Russia troops or tanks. There was no immediate response from Russia itself.
"I think the world should think very carefully about what is going on here," Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili said. "We need to stop everything that can be stopped now."
What needs to be stopped, Saakashvili, is your piss-poor attempt at Empire-building, and similar efforts by your neoCON masters in Washington - preferably BEFORE the nukes start flying.
Haha: An 'end run' around Russia? You see, this is what happens when you're led by people who think that the world is one big game of American Football. (It's more a combination of Chess, Poker and dumb luck/chaos). No wonder the NeoCons are being ass-raped by reality...
Look, it's not as though I want suck on Putin's pipe, but seriously - our Feudal Overlords really have to put forth a better effort. All you had to do was make nice with the Iranians. Ever met a Persian you couldn't haggle with?
Fucking beltway morons - they'll be the death of us all.
It is certain that the Georgian invasion of South Ossetia was a Bush Regime orchestrated event. The American media and the neocon think tanks were ready with their propaganda blitzes. Neocons had ready a Wall Street Journal editorial page article for Saakashvili that declares “the war in Georgia is a war for the West.”...
...The neocon Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., quickly called a conference hosted by warmonger Ariel Cohen, “Urgent! Event: Russian-Georgian War: A Challenge for the U.S. and the World.”
The Washington Post lifted its skirts and spread wide its legs to neocon Robert Kagen’s war drums, “Putin Makes His Move.”
Only a fool like Kagen could think that if Putin intended to invade Georgia he would do so from Beijing, or that after sending the American-trained Georgian army in flight, he would not continue and conquer all of Georgia in order to put an end to American machinations on Russia’s most sensitive border, machinations that are likely to eventually end in nuclear war.
That despicable whore, the New York Times, spread her legs for Billy Kristol’s rant, “Will Russia Get Away With It?” Kristol thunders against “dictatorial and aggressive and fanatical regimes” that “seem happy to work together to weaken the influence of the United States and its democratic allies.” Kristol presents a new axis of evil--Russia, China, North Korea and Iran--and warns against “delay and irresolution” that “simply invite future threats and graver dangers.”
In other words, “attack Russia now.”
Dick Cheney, the insane American Vice President telephoned Saakashvili to express US solidarity with Georgia in the conflict with Russia and declared: “Russian aggression must not go unanswered.” Cheney’s telephone call is like Great Britain’s “guarantee” to Poland against Nazi Germany. Only a complete idiot would tell Saakashvili anything other than “to cease immediately.”
It's quite a display of madness by the leaders of the West - to be contrasted with - amazing as this may sound - Russia's current restraint ... which is about the only thing keeping this show from going Nuclear at the moment.
Even America’s European allies, chafing under their role of supplying troops for America’s Empire, must now realize that being an American ally is dangerous and has no benefits. If Georgia becomes a NATO member and renews its attack on South Ossetia, it must drag Europe into a war with Russia, a main supplier of energy to Europe.
Moreover, if Russian troops are sent across European frontiers, there is nothing to stop them.
What does America offer Europe, aside from the millions of dollars it pays to buy off Europe’s political leaders to insure that they betray their own peoples? Nothing whatsoever.
The only military threat that Europe faces comes from being dragged into America’s wars for American hegemony.
The US is financially bankrupt, with budget and trade deficits that exceed the combined deficits of the rest of the world together. The dollar has wilted. The American consumer market is dying from the offshoring of American jobs and, thereby, incomes, and from the wealth effect of the real estate and derivatives collapses. The US has nothing to offer Europe. Indeed, American economic decline is killing European exports by driving up the value of the euro...
...The neoconned Bush Regime is furious that the Russian bear was not intimidated by the US supported aggression of the American puppet state, Georgia. Instead of accepting the act of American hegemony that the neocon script called for, Russia sent the Americanized Georgian army fleeing in fear.
Having failed with weapons, the Bush Regime now unleashes the rhetoric. The White House is warning Russia that failure to acquiesce to US hegemony could have a “significant, long-term impact on relations between Washington and Moscow.”
Do the morons who comprise the Bush Regime really not understand that short of a surprise nuclear attack on Russia there is nothing whatsoever the US can do to Moscow?
The Bush Regime owns no Russian currency that it can dump. The Russians own US dollars.
The Bush Regime owns no Russian bonds that it can dump. The Russians own US bonds.
The US can cut Russia off from no energy supplies. Russia can cut America’s European allies off from energy.
Heh, heh, heh...
Hey, have any of my frat brothers spanked any hot volleyball ass lately?
An AP reporter saw dozens of trucks and armored vehicles leaving Gori, roaring southeast. Soldiers waved at journalists and one soldier jokingly shouted to a photographer: "Come with us, beauty, we're going to Tbilisi!"
But the convoy turned north and left the highway about an hour's drive from the Georgian capital, and set up camp a mile off the road. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Russian troops were near Gori to secure weapons left behind by the Georgians.
To the west, Russian-backed Abkhazian separatists pushed Georgian troops out of Abkhazia and even moved into Georgian territory itself, defiantly planting a flag over the Inguri River and laughing that retreating Georgians had received "American training in running away."
Two other events are setting the stage for renewed -- and possibly more dangerous -- conflict. First Georgia has resigned from the Commonwealth of Independent States. Second, NATO has announced that it will proceed with plans to admit Georgia to the Alliance. Excuse me...was that the Georgia that existed last week or the Georgia that exists today as a new NATO member? I cannot see NATO admitting a partitioned Georgia. Saakashvili overplayed his hand and will likely lose internal support. So what? Georgia is a U.S. baby no matter who holds office. Russia and NATO do not appear any closer to blinking even though one of them will ultimately have to. And that's where the presuure on geopolitical fault lines has not lessened. This week may have only been a foreshock.
If NATO is dumb enough to begin the process of Georgian membership, then I'll start practicing "duck and cover", just to be on the safe side...
The aftershocks of this wild gamble by Saakashvili are just beginning. This is Russia’s most serious altercation with a foreign country since the collapse of the Soviet Union and could escalate into an all-out war engulfing much of the Caucasus region. Russian warships are not planning to block shipments of oil from Georgia’s Black Sea port of Poti, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Grigory Karasin said on Sunday, but reserve the right to search ships coming to and from it. Another source naval source said, “The crews are assigned the task to not allow arms and military hardware supplies to reach Georgia by sea.” The Russians have already sunk a Georgian missile boat that was trying to attack Russian ships. Upping the ante, Ukraine said it reserved the right to bar Russian warships from returning to their nominally Ukrainian — formerly Russian — base of Sevastopol , on the Crimean peninsula. On Saturday, Russia accused Ukraine of “arming the Georgians to the teeth.”
Washington's bloody fingerprints are all over the invasion of South Ossetia. Georgia President Mikhail Saakashvili would never dream of launching a massive military attack unless he got explicit orders from his bosses at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. After all, Saakashvili owes his entire political career to American power-brokers and US intelligence agencies. If he disobeyed them, he'd be gone in a fortnight. Besides an operation like this takes months of planning and logistical support; especially if it's perfectly timed to coincide with the beginning of the Olympic games. (another petty neocon touch) That means Pentagon planners must have been working hand in hand with Georgian generals for months in advance. Nothing was left to chance.
Another tell-tale sign of US complicity is the way President Bush has avoided ordering Georgian troops to withdraw from a province that has been under the protection of international peacekeepers. Remember how quickly Bush ordered Sharon to withdraw from his rampage in Jenin? Apparently it's different when the aggression serves US interests.
I'd be my left nut that an average Joe Sixpack (if he's aware of the war at all) probably thinks that it started when Russia invaded Georgia (rather than when Georgia invaded Ossetia)...
Putin–the black belt Judo-master–has proved to be as adept at geopolitics as he is at “deal-making”. He has collaborated with the Austrian government on a huge natural gas depot in Austria which will facilitate the transport of gas to southern Europe. He has joined forces with German industry to build an underwater pipeline through the Baltic to Germany (which could provide 80% of Germany’s gas requirements) He has selected France’s Total to assist Gazprom in the development of the massive Shtokman gas field. And he is setting up pipeline corridors to provide gas to Turkey and the Balkans. Putin has very deliberately spread Russia’s influence evenly throughout Europe with the intention of severing the Transatlantic Alliance and, eventually, loosening America’s vice-like grip on the continent...
...Putin has played his cards very wisely, which makes it look like the fighting in South Ossetia may be Washington's way of trying to win through military force what they could not achieve via the free market.
On Saturday, President Bush issued this statement from Beijing: "We have urged an immediate halt to the violence and a stand-down by all troops. We call for an end to the Russian bombings and a return by the parties to the status quo of August 6th."
That was it. Bush then quickly returned to the Olympic festivities. He was last spotted at a photo op with the US girls volleyball team jumping up and down on the beach-sand in his wingtips. The pretense that Bush is leading the country has seemingly been abandoned altogether. Cheney is in charge now.
But what is more important is that the developments that have led the way down until now, keep getting worse. In housing, we see British real estate agents down to one sale per week.
In the US, Alt-A, Option-ARM and prime mortgages are starting to default in frighteningly large numbers. In both countries, the tendency and direction in the financial world is one of an increasing tightening of credit.
No matter what is offered to Fannie and Freddie, they are both so deep in the doghouse that they must cut their purchases of mortgage loans. They cannot take on more risk.
Their shares have entered single-digit numbers, and there is no respite; they lose more every single day, and the point will come when they're worth less than a dollar per share. That is simply too low to be considered going concerns.
That means no-one is left to purchase loans, in no shape or form. Banks and lenders can’t keep them on their books, because they in turn also cannot take on more risk. And investors today feel about mortgage backed securities the way they do about their mothers-in-law.
This will mean that banks have no more credit to lend out, not for individuals looking for a home mortgage, a student loan or a car loan, nor for companies seeking to finance their operations.
Our societies will cease to function the way they always have during our lifetimes, and that will force us to adopt an entirely new (for us) way of living and working.
The only correct way to summarize the state of the real estate industry, in the US, and the UK and soon in many more countries, is "collapse". 90%+ of builders and lenders will go the way of the dodo.
A vast majority of the companies in the field are bleeding money left right and center. They have survived this far because they had some reserves, and their accounting methods are allowed to be borderline criminally creative.
However, the main, and often only, reason they hold on is their hope and faith that things will soon turn around and happy la-la land days will be back.
But finance is not a religion, and faith can’t print money. There will be no magical comeback of anything even resembling the industry as it was until recently, not for many years. We have literally spent our future.
There remain trillions of dollars in unaddressed gambling debt problems in vaults around the world. Some of them are housing related, but many more are not.
The giant Threadneedle and Wall Street casino's have bet on everything that moves, and for good measure also on everything that doesn't. Until we have seen the bets, and they have been properly processed and paid off, nothing will be solved.
And as we saw yesterday, an estimated $1.2 trillion and $6 trillion have vanished from Britain's and America's respective total wealth. In one year.
That is about $20.000 for every citizen of these countries, and $80.000 for a nuclear family. And the losses don't just continue unabated, they get worse. This cannot go on much longer; something's got to give.
The present euphoria is not a sign of a return to stable and well-funded conditions. It's the expected and inevitable sign of dangerous volatility, the kind that can blow up at any given moment.
Just great: Gold is mined with child labour. As is chocolate, btw. So how do I buy gold now, if it's contaminated with child slavery? Homo sapiens = Failed species. I don't lose sleep about our looming collapse any more. We deserve it.
Some big chunks of text about Georgia/Russia/NATO. I tried to whittle down to the highlights (or lowlights), but there's much worth reading. I advise following the links and read all the pages.
Most likely the Georgians just thought the Russians wouldn’t react. They were doing something they learned from Bush and Cheney: sticking to best-case scenarios, positive thinking. The Georgian plan was classic shock’n’awe with no hard, grown-up thinking about the long term. Their shiny new army would go in, zap the South Ossetians while they were on a peace hangover (the worst kind), and then…uh, they’d be welcomed as liberators? Sure, just like we were in Iraq. Man, you pay a price for believing in Bush. The Georgians did. They thought he’d help. And I just saw the little creep on TV, sitting in the stands watching the US-China basketball game...I didn’t even recognize Bush at first, just wondered why they kept doing close-ups of this guy who looked like Hank Hill’s legless dad up in the stands. Then they said it was the Prez. They talk about people “growing in office”; well, he shrunk...
...Luckily, South Ossetia doesn’t matter that much. I’m just being honest here. In a year nobody will care much who runs that little glob of territory. What’s more serious is that another, bigger and more strategic chunk of Georgia called Abkhazia, on the Black Sea, is taking the opportunity to boot out the last Georgian troops on its territory. Georgia may lose almost all its coastline, but then the Georgians were always an inland people anyway, living along river valleys, not great sailors....
...The fretting and fussing and sky-is-falling crap about this war is going to die down fast, and the bottom line will be simple: the Georgians overplayed their hand and got slapped, and we caught a little of the follow-through, which is what happens when you waste your best troops—and Georgia’s, for that matter—on a dumb war in the wrong place. We detatched Kosovo from a Russian ally; they detached South Ossetia from an American ally. It’s a pawn exchange, if that. If it signals anything bigger, it’s the fact that the US is weaker than it was ten years ago and Russia is much, much stronger than it was in Yeltsin’s time. But anybody with sense knew all that already.
the US has no stomach to directly engage a nuclear-armed military state like Russia. We prefer to assault those who cannot defend themselves, and even then, there can be problems, as the Iraqi insurgency and Afghan counter-attacks have shown. And if poor people in slums and the mountains can give the American military fits, imagine what the Russian armored machine would do.
While it's a good and sane thing that the US will not (at least so far) fight Saakashvili's war for him, the larger geopolitical battle goes on. NATO is looking to diminish if not eliminate Russia's influence in the region, of which Saakashvili is a piece, however reckless his recent actions; and then there's the endless war over energy resources, primarily oil, which is global.
Is it possible that the US/Georgia knew what they doing? Could it be a cunning plan to ease Georgian membership in NATO? This is a very different interptretation of events from the Georgian overreach viewpoint. Time shall tell. I prefer to assign stupidity rather than such malicious intelligence. It's not like we've seen much sign of strategic genius from the NeoCons over the last 7 years. Everything they turn has a funny habit of turning to shit - so perhaps this is no different. Nevertheless:
Bush said he is "deeply concerned" and that Russian intervention is a "dangerous escalation ... endangering regional peace"...
...But at the outbreak of violence, Russia had tried to have the United Nations Security Council issue a statement calling on Georgia and South Ossetia to immediately lay down weapons. However, Washington was disinterested. As the Russian ambassador to the UN, Vitaly Churkin, put it, there was an "absence of political will" within the Security Council...
...What is the US game plan? To begin with, Saakashvili is a progeny of the "color revolution" in Georgia, which was financed and stage-managed by the US in 2003. Georgia and the southern Caucasus constitute a critically important region for the US since it straddles a busy transportation route for energy - like the Indian Ocean or the Persian Gulf. It can be used as a choke point. Simply put, keeping it under control as a sphere of influence is highly advantageous for the pursuit of US geopolitical interests in the Eurasian region. A rollback of Russian influence therefore becomes a desirable objective...
...In geopolitical terms a flashpoint in the Caucasus at this juncture suits Washington. A furious propaganda barrage against Russia has begun. It is already at a high pitch. US statements have virtually overlooked the Georgian onslaught on South Ossetia and the attack on Russian peacemakers. The focus is on the Russian response to the Georgian provocation. An attempt has begun to portray Russia as the aggressor. Washington is carefully cultivating an opinion in Western capitals that Moscow is "bullying" Tbilisi.
This propaganda is bound to strengthen Washington's case for inducting Georgia into NATO. At NATO's summit meeting in April, it became apparent that despite its robust attempts for months, Washington needs to overcome resistance within NATO on Georgia's membership, especially from Germany, France and Italy. The European countries are wary of provoking Moscow and creating new East-West barriers, especially at a time when the imperatives of energy security are in everyone's mind....
...From Washington's perspective, there is nothing like getting Russia bogged down in the Caucasus if it saps Russia's capacity to play an effective role on the world stage. It is all too apparent that Moscow dreads a full-blown war erupting in the Caucasus and was desperately keen to avoid one...
...In sum, it belies logic that Saakashvili acted impulsively. Georgians have a reputation for being hot-tempered, but he is also a trained lawyer - trained in the US. He can't be so naive about the facts of life and the certainty that he would get a bloody nose if he tried to take on the Russian army...
...The point is, the Bush administration cannot afford to fail in this Caucasian venture. It will be seen as needlessly having blood on its hands unless US diplomacy successfully turns the tide in its favor and takes matters to their cold, logical conclusion - induction of Georgia into NATO.
Washington has barely four months to achieve this objective. But it is not a tall order. If the Bush administration succeeds, a page in history is written. We may conclusively say goodbye to the post-Cold War era. Russia's relations with Europe and the US can never be the same again. Blood has been drawn, after all. The Beijing Olympics, in comparison, pale in significance.
William Engdahl: America risks nuclear war with Russia. Engdahl was once a Peak Oiler, but switched to believing in the far-out "abiotic" theory of oil formation. He also thinks that the oil price spike was the result of "speculators". Just FYI.
This past April at the NATO summit in Bucharest, Romania, US President Bush proposed accepting Georgia into NATO’s "Action Plan for Membership," a precursor to NATO membership. To Washington’s surprise, ten NATO member states refused to support his plan, including Germany, France and Italy.
They argued that accepting the Georgians was problematic, because of the conflicts in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. They were in reality saying that they would not be willing to back Georgia as, under Article 5 of the NATO treaty, which mandates that an armed attack against any NATO member country must be considered an attack against them all and consequently requires use of collective armed force of all NATO members, it would mean that Europe could be faced with war against Russia over the tiny Caucasus Republic of Georgia, with its incalculable dictator, Saakashvili. That would mean the troubled Caucasus would be on a hair-trigger to detonate World War III.
Russia threatens Georgia, but Georgia threatens Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Russia looks like a crocodile to Georgia, but Georgia looks to Russia like the cats' paw of the West. Since Saakashvili took power in late 2003 the Pentagon has been in Georgia giving military aid and training. Not only are US military personnel active in Georgia today. According to an Israeli-intelligence source, DEBKAfile, in 2007, the Georgian President Saakashvili
"commissioned from private Israeli security firms several hundred military advisers, estimated at up to 1,000, to train the Georgian armed forces in commando, air, sea, armored and artillery combat tactics. They also have been giving instruction on military intelligence and security for the central regime. Tbilisi also purchased weapons, intelligence and electronic warfare systems from Israel. These advisers were undoubtedly deeply involved in the Georgian army’s preparations to conquer the South Ossetian capital Friday."
Debkafile reported further, "Moscow has repeatedly demanded that Jerusalem halt its military assistance to Georgia, finally threatening a crisis in bilateral relations. Israel responded by saying that the only assistance rendered Tbilisi was ‘defensive.’" The Israeli news source added that Israel’s interest in Georgia has to do as well with Caspian oil pipeline geopolitics. "Jerusalem has a strong interest in having Caspian oil and gas pipelines reach the Turkish terminal port of Ceyhan, rather than the Russian network. Intense negotiations are afoot between Israel Turkey, Georgia, Turkmenistan and Azarbaijan for pipelines to reach Turkey and thence to Israel’s oil terminal at Ashkelon and on to its Red Sea port of Eilat. From there, supertankers can carry the gas and oil to the Far East through the Indian Ocean."
This means that the attack on South Ossetia is the first battle in a new proxy warfare between Anglo-American-Israeli led interests and Russia. The only question is whether Washington miscalculated the swiftness and intensity of the Russian response to the Georgian attacks of 8.8.08.
So far, each step in the Caucasus drama has put the conflict on a yet higher plane of danger. The next step will no longer be just about the Caucasus, or even Europe. In 1914 it was the "Guns of August" that initiated the Great War. This time the Guns of August 2008 could be the detonator of World War III and a nuclear holocaust of unspeakable horror.
Oil price pullback - Sunrise or a Lull Before the Storm? One thing that's spooked me about the high oil prices was the lack of actual physical shortages (in the West, at any rate. There were shortages - are shortages - in Africa). Another item that must await the test of time. I want to see lines of cars queued around the block, full to the brim of frightened and desperate motorists.
A must-read account of Georgia's recent history by Dmitri Orlov (who has been there, and speaks some of the languages). Dmitri is a superstar in the Peak Oil doomerverse. He's worth more than all the TV bobblehead circus clowns combined.
Georgia: the latest victims of a neoCon con job. Did they really think that NATO and/or the US would fight Russia, and start WW3? To defend a country of 4.5 million? Smoking a crack pipe indeed!
EU's dream of energy independence from Russia may be a pipe dream.
Putin's playing chess, and everyone else is playing Tic Tac Toe. Bush? He's jerking off at the Olympics, acting the brain-dead cheerleader (the only job for which he's ever been qualified). That's it George - while Putin reconstitutes the Soviet Union and steals back 1% of the world's oil supplies, you're busy smacking female beach volleyball players on the ass.
You stupid, drunken twat.
Wow, CNN, you just outdid yourselves. I call these MSM goons corporate stenographers for a very good reason. (Click the image below for a full-res version - in all its glory, with and without commentary).
Oh God - CNN just adding a huge "breaking news" splash - some Americans were stabbed in Beijing. As long as they weren't stabbed in Ossetia or Georgia, that's a relief!
Mike Ruppert does a better job than the "Fourth Estate" - yes, that's what the narcissist US hacks call themselves!
Meantime, not a word from Bush or Cheney who -- I'm certain -- are flummoxed and spasmodic. I can see nothing that will prevent the completion of Russia's Order of Battle within the ne
