Putin, Putin everywhere
Under the bed,
He’s in your head,
He’s all you’re fed,
He’s all that’s said,
He’s all that’s read,
Please O please send him away
Little NATO wants to play.
We May be a Think Tank, But Don’t ask Us to Think
Putin, China, Iran, Al Quaeda and ISIS, together again at last! The new neocon nightmare!!!!
Al Qaeda and ISIS also pose a threat to the continued existence of the world order we have known for decades through their constant and periodically-successful efforts to destroy states on which regional order depends.
Those efforts unintentionally cohere with Putin’s drive to reverse the outcome of the Cold War by truncating the territory and sovereignty of Soviet successor states, separating Europe from the U.S., and breaking both NATO and the European Union. They coincide with Chinese undertakings through the finely-calibrated use and threat of force to gain territory, separate the U.S. from its Asian allies, and acquire hegemony in the western Pacific. They interact with Iranian efforts to expel the United States, Britain, and the West from the Middle East and establish Persian hegemony from Afghanistan to the Mediterranean.
Frederick W. Kagan, Kimberly Kagan, Jennifer Cafarella, Harleen Gambhir, and Katherine Zimmerman: U.S. GRAND STRATEGY: DESTROYING ISIS AND AL QAEDA, REPORT ONE; AL QAEDA AND ISIS: EXISTENTIAL THREATS TO THE U.S. AND EUROPE; January 2016
http://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/PLANEX_Report1_FINAL.pdf
Today’s Quotation About Putin
Putin, after all, is noted for being one of the coldest, most ruthless of Soviet-era intelligence agents, and he has put the security apparatus in charge of Russia.
Georgie Anne Geyer, Universal Press Syndicate, “Trip reveals standards for NATO, Europe”, 22 June 2001, http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2001-06-22/news/0106220080_1_president-putin-nato-expansion-russia
Corruption is More Complicated Than That
I am tired of people talking about “corruption” in a simple-minded way.
Imagine three cases.
- The government spends tax money on a hospital but, in order to get any service, the patients must hand over small bribes to doctors, nurses and staff.
- The hospital is built, but the money for operating costs has been embezzled.
- The money for the hospital, operating costs and everything else is stolen before it leaves the capital.
Ask yourself these two questions.
- Which is the worst case of corruption? The answer is obvious: the third case although very few people know it even happened.
- Which is the most visible form of corruption? Again, obviously the first case because hundreds of people know about it.
And that is why I don’t take perceptions of corruption indices very seriously.
And it is why I think that, when people are speaking of corruption, they should think harder about big corruption and less about petty corruption.
For example: “Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.” Or, in plainer language: “When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose.” And that is certainly corruption.
I would suggest that our part of the world has a lot more invisible corruption than Russia even if the latter has more visible corruption.
So, the question of whether Russia is more corrupt than some other country needs much more careful thinking than it generally gets.
Today’s Putin Quotation
The world cannot develop effectively and positively if one state has a monopoly on taking and implementing whatever decisions it wants… In the history of mankind, such a drive for a monopoly has never ended well. For that reason, we are constantly proposing a different democratic world structure.
Geoffrey York and Chrystia Freeland: “We are not looking for enemies”, Globe and Mail, 14 Dec 2000 http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/we-are-not-looking-for-enemies/article1086359/
Today’s Quotation About Putin
Putinism is no more than the impoverished philosophy of absolute power shared by the security services and the oligarchs close to them. It is yet another road to nowhere followed by Russia across the endless snow-swept plains of its history.
Andrei Piontkovsky, “So much for the year of RF President Putin”, Globe and Mail, 28 Dec 2000. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/so-much-for-the-year-of-putin/article771694/
Let’s Sanction Those Pesky Russians
Here’s the text of the Minsk II agreement. (My italics) “9. Restore control of the state border to the Ukrainian government in the whole conflict zone, which has to start on the first day after the local election and end after the full political regulation (local elections in particular districts of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts based on the law of Ukraine and Constitutional reform) by the end of 2015, on the condition of fulfillment of Point 11 – in consultations and in agreement with representatives of particular districts of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts within the framework of the Trilateral Contact Group.”
Let’s blame the Russians for not sticking to the Minsk Agreement, shall we?
The Yawning Heights of New Ibansk
http://russia-insider.com/en/yawning-heights-new-ibansk/ri12389
(My title is a tribute to Зияющие Высоты by Aleksandr Zinoviev which I read years ago. We all now live the Total Ism in New Ibansk.)
As the West spirals down the toilet there are occasional – well, truth to tell, not so occasional – signposts of decline along the way. One is this piece from The Guardian; the title is pretty self-explanatory. “Europe is in crisis. Once more, America will have to step in to save us.” By one Natalie Nougayrède, she starts off comparing Joe Biden to George Marshall. To which one can only say !.
In essence Washington has to save Europe from Brexit; save it from Russia’s “military offensive” (such a slow-moving one, isn’t it? still not past Donetsk airport after months of fighting and dozens of invasions.) And take a few more Syrian refugees.
Oh, and US President Obama maybe should put Churchill’s bust back in the White House.
There. Fixed that, didn’t she?
But the interesting fact is not that the editors of The Guardian thought it worth while to devote space and, one assumes a fee, to this pitiful tripe but the reactions of the readers. I invite you to look through the comments – 800+ so far – and find one that is not completely scornful and contemptuous of what Nougayrède has written.
Here are some:
So then: to ‘save’ the EU, the US should attempt to influence a UK referendum, take some unspecified military action against Russia, and accept many more Syrian refugees even though most migrants entering the EU are not Syrians.
Yes, that sounds like a plan.Bonkers logic there again from Natalie Nougayrede.
Yep,cos it’s not as if US foreign policy has triggered crisis in the middle east or prodding the bear has resulted in Putin’s actions in Ukraine. America can do no wrong,of course.
the last thing is to let the USA into our problems, it was they who started it in the first place
So the EU is a complete failure get out now and lets make our own decisions
Europeans can perfectly well look after themselves thanks… given that they get rid of the impenetrable layer of self serving fuckwits that run the place. THEY are the problem – not ‘Europeans’.
It seems that Natalie, whom I may have assumed wrongly is French, has fallen off the edge of her right wing flat earth and not heard that among many thinking people the U.S. has acquired the title of the ’empire of chaos’. Europe could certainly do without any more of that.
I don’t know if the Europeans will rise up, march on Brussels and raze it to the ground some day or whether they have become so morally emaciated that, as many Americans apparently are doing, they drink themselves to death in despair.
But, eventually, one way or the other, this will stop and New Ibansk will fall as Old Ibansk fell.
Today’s Putin Quotation
If we’re looking at a mechanism for settling complicated issues such as these, our position is clear: this mechanism exists in the form of the United Nations and its Security Council. There is no other such universal mechanism in the world today. I believe that only through the United Nations can we resolve these kinds of problems, by being patient, working together, taking each other’s interests into account and acting in accordance with international law.
Putin, Press conference, 20 June 2003, answering question about Iraq,
http://archive.kremlin.ru/eng/speeches/2003/06/20/1712_type82915_47467.shtml
Today’s Quotation About Putin
The Putin regime is beginning to resemble that of Leonid Brezhnev, who never stirred the waters and always maintained the status quo – while sending troops into Afghanistan in a show of might that turned out to be illusory. The Putin administration may be remembered in a similar way – for having maintained the status quo at a very high price, including a bloody war in Chechnya.
The Russia Journal, “An empty address” 18 May 2003 http://russiajournal.com/node/15335
Russia Observer 