Posts by Simon Grigg
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Not that the demise of Chrysler, GM and Ford would be any great loss to the world.
yes but any rush towards a new cold war is going to benefit these guys rather well.
Just borrow a few billion more from Japan and China and everyone in those Detroit boardrooms will happy for a few more years.
Sadly, it doesn't seem to matter how much money they borrow and spend on defence, the US power influence just about everywhere has waned..South America, Asia, and the Middle East and Western Europe in no smart part to the Iraq mess. That Polish deal might piss a few people off (notably Russia) but it can also be seen as a rather desperate attempt to flex muscles in one of the few places where they can still do so unfettered.
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Ignoring the folly of talking yourself into another cold war for no good reason of course.
Lotsa good reasons
a) it's good for the military and their industry, especially as Iraq looks like it might have an enforced withdrawal date.
b) it keeps the populace frightened and supportive
c) it gives the nutters someone to rail angrily and irrationally against, online, in print and in the bars of the USA
d) it's good for Hollywoodlots more good reasons I bet.....
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Surprising as it feels we appear to be in significant agreement. It certainly seems as if Georgia is the first of a number of Eastern European and Central Asian countries that are about to feel the reassertion of the Russia of old, reinvigorated under Vlad the Nasty. Not good at all, for anyone, except Vlad and his buddies.
Ukraine's Yushenko needs to be very careful, he has a very large Russian minority in his country. It would not be difficult at all for Vlad to engineer a collapse of Yushenko's regime.
No we are not James. You are oversimplifying the situation, and cartoonising it again with all this puerile Vlad / Barry Obambi twaddle. Nobody rationally, outside Americans-need-an-orgeville, thinks that Russia is going to roll through Eastern Europe again (forgetting conveniently that both the USA and the UK gave them the green light to do so in the first place all those years ago). However, the Ukraine is seriously risking a major confrontation if it flexes it's muscle over Sevastapol, encouraged by the current US administration (whose fairly hopeless Secretary of State, a proclaimed Russian Expert, has proved to be anything but) and pushes the bear. The rest is ludicrous US rightwing fantasy.
Except the alternative seems to be sitting in Teplitz on 2 October 1938. When neither precedent is good, take the least bad one.
Except the chances of NATO or anyone else actually sending the 82nd Airborne to defend Georgia are rationally nil, which the Russians know, so you end up with a flattened Georgia and an alliance technically at war with a nuclear armed nation. It's still nuts. Which is why saner minds than found in Washington right now said no to Nato membership.
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I have great memories of that ball of fluff that used to spread itself across the sofa around at Ring Terrace. Tonka was not a cat you could avoid noticing. And you said he got larger in recent years!
RIP Tonka
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And the other question has to be, how far Bush / Obama / McCain is willing to go if this story has legs
South Ossetia was first. But it may well not be last. If I were Ukraine, I'd let those ships back into Sevastopol, because odds are Russia is just waiting for an excuse. And violating a treaty would give Russia all the excuse it needs to itself unilaterally discard the treaty which gave Crimea to the Ukraine, then create some "facts on the ground".
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If you want to prevent a war supply defensive firepower to the weaker state and state alliances.
And bang, before you know it, you are sitting in Sarajevo, on 28 June, 1914. I'm sorry Angus but that is completely nuts.
A few stinger missiles are hardly going to prevent Russia from using overwhelming force and may actually increase the damage to Georgia. I would have thought that, given recent events, getting the current Georgian leadership as far away from triggers as possible is a wiser course of action, especially if some of those triggers are tied to alliances..
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The world is ... a Marvel Comic.....Barry Obambi
Ahh...I wake up and see James is back
Condi Rice has been very firmly in charge of US foreign policy these last four years and her actions, or inactions on many occasions, have hardly smacked of neocon impulses.
Or competence for that matter
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Including, famously, demanding that the barbarian upstart Victoria send them some tribute right quick when the first major English embassy showed up.
I think you have your monarchs mixed up, Lord Macartney answered to George III, if that's who you refer to. By Victoria's time China had reason to understand a little more of the impact the British Empire would have on them.
But lets face it, all empires justify their expansion under the guise of civilisation..be it religion, knowledge or some version of freedom.
Hush, Sam. Don't you know China is just misunderstood by big Western racists?
It's such a burden advancing these savages, especially when they don't know they need it.
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Was that ever true? Or merely wishful thinking, with the idea becoming widely entrenched via a certain level of media dominance.
well certainly in the decade after the wall came down, Russia was reeling in many ways, China was only just starting to find it's feet.
But that article I mentioned in some other thread out of Singapore's Straits Times where US candidates talked of policies for containing China was a fair indication that in mainstream America there is little realisation still that the time is long past.
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A situation caused largely by America's foreign policy decisions.
Indeed and the litany of disastrous foreign policy missteps seem likely to be continued by any McCain administration, and, on current form, perhaps only slightly watered down by Obama as he reels from having to deal with the frankly cartoonishness of mainstream America's worldview.