Keyboard worrier

Tuesday, July 29, 2014

The Human Fruit Machine

 At the Marldon Apple Pie Fair, Devon, 26.07.2014
On a count of three, the children pull out a random fruit. We won! Brilliant.

  
The apple pie, served with clotted creammm
 
The Exeter Pipe Band
 
I was struck by the last tune they played before the march-off, so I asked Pipey. He gave a wry smile and told me it was "The Gael" from "Last of the Mohicans." Ignorant Sassenach, eh?
 
But I don't see why it can't be authentic if it's not ancient - after all, when the MacCrimmons composed theirs it was new to them. One day they'll honour the name of Dougie Maclean, too. Besides, I think the band's rendition was better than the film's soundtrack.




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Monday, July 28, 2014

Frederick Forsyth on freedom and security

Frederick Forsyth's latest thriller, "The Kill List", is as you'd expect, topical and gripping. An evil Islamic propagandist on the US Pesident's weekly-reviewed assassination list is tracked down and eliminated, using all the sophistication of computer hacking, spy drones and massive databases.

Forsyth's fiction is built on well-researched fact. The Presidential "kill list" really exists, and so does the secretive behemoth of Joint Special Ops Command (J-SOC). Here is an extract from Chapter Two:

"Nine Eleven had triggered a sea change in the American Armed Forces and governmental attitudes to any even remotely conceivable possible threat to the USA. National alertness inched its way towards paranoia. The original sixteen intel. gathering agencies of the USA ballooned to over a thousand.

"By 2012 accurate estimates put the number of Americans with top secret clearance at 850,000. Over 1,200 government organizations and 2,000 private companies were working on top secret projects related to counter-torrism and homeland security at over 10,000 locations across the country. [...]

"The most fundamental increase was in Joint Special Ops Command, or J-SOC. This body had existed for years before Nine Eleven but as a low-profile and principally defensive structure. Two men would convert it into the largest, most aggressive and most lethal private army in the world.

"The word 'private' is justified because it is the personal instrument of the President and of no other.  It can conduct covert war without seeking any sanction from Congress; its multi-billion dollar budget is acquired without ever distrubing the Appropriations Committee, and it can kill you without ruffling the even tenor of the Attorney General's office. It is all top secret."

After this, I anticipated some moral complexity in Forsyth's story, but it concentrates on procedure - how the goodies finally get the baddies. Still, maybe he feels he's given us enough to think about here. After all, a novel is not a lecture.

For freedom and civil rights do seem to matter to him. Here he is in the Daily Express four years ago, commenting on David Davis' 2008 resignation on terror legislation issues:

"He resigned on a point of principle and that principle was the systematic annihilation of chunks of traditional British rights and freedoms by Labour on the usual grounds of “secooooority”. It happens he regards civil rights as damned important, hardly the hallmark of a hang-’em-and-flog-’em dinosaur.

"If to blow away your career on a point of humanitarian principle is “Right wing” some newspapers need a new dictionary. He is actually a traditionalist and things such as habeas corpus, presumed innocence until conviction and no detention without charge are traditional British rights."

How much does J-SOC cost? A secret, though it's thought to be in the billions. And how many lives has it saved - net, discounting for the innocents killed in Hellfire missile strikes and the like? Would the same money spent elsewhere do more good for less expense - for example, the $1,928 estimated cost per life saved in improving neonatal care?

And there are so many other ways to save life in the USA:



Source: Wikipedia

Instead, we have CIA torture (this from Texas Republican Ron Paul, who calls for the Agency to be shut down), and as Washington's Blog says, the crushing of dissent not only abroad but inside the US, plus the backing of ultra-violent groups in foreign countries.

And terrorist attacks on US citizens abroad?

 

Figure 2-01. Leading causes of injury death for
US citizens in foreign countries, 2009–20111,2

(Source)
 
Time for an enquiry into the cost-effectiveness of carte-blanche blank-cheque security arrangements?


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Tuesday, July 22, 2014

The rise and fall of the gentleman

Source

Do you know any gentlemen? Perhaps you do - perhaps you are even a member of that apparently dwindling band? For we chaps it's not an easy question is it - am I a gentleman

In my case the answer is a reluctant "no". It may not even be a practical proposition in the modern world yet I have a sneaking suspicion that those with no wish to be a gentleman probably aren't.

I may as well add here that I prefer not to pose a similar question our lady readers. If I may I'll stick to the gentlemen - to coin a phrase.

gentleman
Pronunciation: /ˈdʒɛnt(ə)lmən

NOUN (plural gentlemen)
1 A chivalrous, courteous, or honourable man: he behaved throughout like a perfect gentleman

Historically a gentleman has been many things and chivalrous might be a tad tricky in most areas of modern life, but courteous and honourable shouldn't be too difficult surely? Our leaders could easily set the trend - leading  by example in fact...

...oh dear. I see this line of reasoning might compel me to say something ungentlemanly about our leaders. Which is something I usually enjoy but for the moment I'd better say nothing and move on to a less unsavoury subject.

In fifty years there will be nothing in Europe but Presidents of Republics, not one King left. And with those four letters K-I-N-G, go the priests and the gentlemen. I can see nothing but  candidates paying court to draggletailed  majorities.
Stendhal - Le Rouge et le Noir (1830)

When Stendhal wrote these words, the use of the term gentleman already seems to have begun its apparently terminal decline although there has been an uptick in recent years. Not exactly a hockey stick though and I'm sure the meaning has shifted anyway.  

Not that we should put too much weight on gentlemanly shoulders because at least some were mountebanks, seducers of virgin innocence and even bankers. Dickens created a few, such as the ghastly Pecksniff who certainly posed as a gentleman, albeit not one of independent means.

So coming back to our less than illustrious leaders as I suppose we must in these troubled times, how about our current crop? Are they gentlemen? Mr Putin? Mr Cameron? Mr Obama? 

Would it help if they were - or have we been seduced by the myths of realpolitik?

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Ukraine: Raedwald's take

Cartoon: Taylor Jones

Raedwald's piece on possible sanctions against Russia includes the potential harm to Eurozone's industry and its banks (which have made big loans to Russia).

So the question is, how much does the USA care about the European side-effects of its geopolitical strategy?

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Monday, July 21, 2014

Russia and the Great Game revisited

(pic source)

A couple of months ago I looked at Russia's possible longer-term evolution ("Russia's big plans", April 28); now Peter Hitchens, still struggling to get a balanced message across all the shrilling, reminds us of the bigger picture as seen by the USA:

"It’s useful, at this point, to recall words written by Zbigniew Brzezinski( Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser, and the unsung architect of Moscow’s doomed intervention and eventual downfall in Afghanistan. He wrote in his 1997 book ‘The Grand Chessboard’ : ‘Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire.’

"‘However, if Moscow regains control over Ukraine, with its 52 million people and major resources as well as access to the Black Sea, Russia automatically again regains the wherewithal to become a powerful imperial state, spanning Europe and Asia.’"

This provides a context for what seems to be an economic war using European gas consumption as its battleground, as discussed earlier today ("A dirty war for clean energy: Ukraine and beyond").

The attempt to contain Russia, which is under pressure to expand economically in order to stave off a kind of collapse, could potentially be as dangerous as the imperial hemming-in of Germany before WWI, or the victors' pound-of-flesh approach to Germany after 1918.

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A dirty war for clean energy: Ukraine and beyond

From Martin Armstrong today (emphases mine):

"We are getting info from reliable sources that there may be another layer to the USA v Russian conflict. Just as the entire Syrian agenda was to arm terrorists to topple the Syrian government in order to push through a pipeline to cut off the energy monopoly in Europe held by Russia, we may be actually seeing another motive here. The projections of fracking technology that the USA will become a net exporter of energy has set the stage for another perhaps covert move – sanctions against Russia to open the European market for energy. In this new war of words and sanctions against Russia, it is the Americans who seem to be marching either totally brain-dead, or with another energy secret agenda. This very will may be all about one thing -:taking the Russian energy market from them. To turn off Russia as a competitor, the Russian president is to be internationally isolated. The shooting down of flight MH17 is playing into this agenda and comes precisely at the right moment to aid the U.S. strategy on energy. We will keep you advised on this matter."

And from an October 2012 VT article:

(source: Veterans Today)

"The significant question to be asked at this point is what could bind Israel, Turkey, Qatar in a form of unholy alliance on the one side, and Assad’s Syria, Iran, Russia and China on the other side, in such deadly confrontation over the political future of Syria? One answer is energy geopolitics.

What has yet to be fully appreciated in geopolitical assessments of the Middle East is the dramatically rising importance of the control of natural gas to the future of not only Middle East gas producing countries, but also of the EU and Eurasia including Russia as producer and China as consumer.

"Natural gas is rapidly becoming the “clean energy” of choice to replace coal and nuclear electric generation across the European Union, most especially since Germany’s decision to phase out nuclear after the Fukushima disaster. Gas is regarded as far more “environmentally friendly” in terms of its so-called “carbon footprint.”

"The only realistic way EU governments, from Germany to France to Italy to Spain, will be able to meet EU mandated CO2 reduction targets by 2020 is a major shift to burning gas instead of coal. Gas reduces CO2 emissions by 50-60% over coal.[xiii]

"Given that the economic cost of using gas instead of wind or other alternative energy forms is dramatically lower, gas is rapidly becoming the energy of demand for the EU, the biggest emerging gas market in the world.

"Huge gas resource discoveries in Israel, in Qatar and in Syria combined with the emergence of the EU as the world’s potentially largest natural gas consumer, combine to create the seeds of the present geopolitical clash over the Assad regime.


"In July 2011, as the NATO and Gulf states’ destabilization operations against Assad in Syria were in full swing, the governments of Syria, Iran and Iraq signed an historic gas pipeline energy agreement which went largely unnoticed amid CNN reports of the Syrian unrest..."

There's more, lots more, in that VT piece.


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Sunday, July 20, 2014

Cabinet reshuffle

Pic: Facebook

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Ukraine: down the memory hole

"Moment they realised it was a civilian plane"

From the Daily Mail, Saturday 19 July 2014, page 4

Interesting to compare the Daily Mail's print edition with its online counterpart. Sam Greenhill's helpful contextualisation (boxed in red above) seems to be missing, at least on my visit to the site (c. 9.30 am).

Perhaps the exclusion is merely to avoid giving more material to conspiracy theorists to fuss over, but in the present climate of profound public distrust it could have the opposite effect. As it is, both versions of the article are festooned with caveats ("appear", "claim", "allegedly" etc).

A little verbal telltale in the translation - "yards" for "gardens" - said "American English" to me, though whether that means translated by an American, or by a Ukrainian who has learned the American version of English, I couldn't say.

From the online Daily Mail (accessed 20 July 2014)

Nothing is what it seems.

And speaking of context, here is the sterling Peter Hitchens  (embedded link is mine):

One thing we should have learned in the past 100 years is that war is hell. We might also have noticed that, once begun, war is hard to stop and often takes shocking turns.
 
So those who began the current war in Ukraine – the direct cause of the frightful murder of so many innocents on Flight MH17 on Thursday – really have no excuse.
 
There is no doubt about who they were. In any war, the aggressor is the one who makes the first move into neutral or disputed territory.
 
And that aggressor was the European Union, which rivals China as the world’s most expansionist power, swallowing countries the way performing seals swallow fish (16 gulped down since 1995).
 
Ignoring repeated and increasingly urgent warnings from Moscow, the EU – backed by the USA – sought to bring Ukraine into its orbit. It did so through violence and illegality, an armed mob and the overthrow of an elected president.
 
I warned then that this would lead to terrible conflict. I wrote in March: ‘Having raised hopes that we cannot fulfil, we have awakened the ancient passions of this cruel part of the world – and who knows where our vainglorious folly will now lead?’
 
Now we see. Largely unreported over the past few months, a filthy little war has been under way in Eastern Ukraine.
 
Many innocents have died, unnoticed in the West. Neither side has anything to boast of – last Tuesday 11 innocent civilians died in an airstrike on a block of flats in the town of Snizhne, which Ukraine is unconvincingly trying to blame on Russia. 
 
 
from Wikipedia


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Saturday, July 19, 2014

Ukraine and the downed Malaysian airliner: four theories

1. For no conceivable advantage and in the certainty that they will be universally vilified, separatist Ukrainian forces deliberately shoot down a civilian airliner travelling from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur.

2. Incompetent pro-Russian Ukrainian forces bring down what they think is an enemy military transport plane. For some reason this aircraft is travelling at a constant altitude of 33,000 feet 20 miles from Russian airspace, into which, travelling at some 500 miles per hour, it will pass in a couple of minutes. Subsequently a source says that oddly, reportedly "uncomfortable" with his route, the pilot has changed his flight plan, which normally would be to cross further south over the Sea of Azov, to head closer to the heart of the conflict:

source: Daily Mail
(UPDATE @ 18:35: see this from The Conversation about flight restrictions in the area.)
 
source: Mashable

3. In a bungled assassination attempt, someone working for the other side hits MH17 by mistake, thinking it to be President Putin's official plane.

4. The missile strike is a "false flag" pseudo-terrorist attack. In order to curb Russian expansionism (or historically, their partial recovery of some territory formerly under Soviet control) and block what may be Putin's plans for the Black Sea and a nascent EEC-style Eastern European economic union, Western agencies are quite happy to murder some 300 innocent civilians to create a pretext for military intervention in the Ukraine - or anti-Russian boycotts and sanctions.

Update (9:12): the trigger-happy-idiots theory may be correct - see Richard North today - but as North says, has the potential for dangerous anti-Russian spin, which Washington's Blog says was the American approach to a similar tragedy in 1983.

Update (21 July): Richard North says that the Ukrainian government was aware of an operational missile launcher in rebel territory and failed in its duty to warn airlines accordingly.


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Friday, July 18, 2014

EU energy security

It has long been my suspicion that for EU bureaucrats, the orthodox climate message is merely a sales pitch for energy security. Nothing whatever to do with science and the real climate except as a PR vehicle. It’s by no means the whole story behind EU climate orthodoxy, but for me there are four points worth considering. 
  • A totalitarian state such as the EU needs energy independence.
  • Too many oil-producers are unstable or potentially unfriendly.
  • Coal and nuclear have too many political hurdles.
  • In a warming world EU peasants should need less energy anyway. 

So it may well be that energy independence is to be purchased at whatever cost to the general EU population, but that cost is not perceived as excessive anyway. At least not to those who matter.

There has always been a problem in taking climate orthodoxy at face value. From the beginning its protagonists have exhibited political rather than scientific behaviour. In a world which failed to warm as predicted, EU climate policies are seriously weird unless climate orthodoxy is not really the political rationale behind them.

Surely we need a vastly more powerful political rationale to explain both the astronomical cost and the implacable way so-called green policies have been enacted. A few degrees of warming doesn’t come close as an explanation and the political classes are wholly uninterested in the projected timescales anyway. 

This degree of extreme political resolve is more characteristic of crazy totalitarian regimes than democracies. Massive projects intended to root out and change forever certain fundamental aspects of civil society. Soviet collective farms for example. Nothing can stop them whatever the cost, be it financial or social.

In which case, any human cost to the EU peasant is sure to be waved aside as collateral damage. Did you expect to be collateral damage one day? No – I suppose folk generally don’t.

The climate message, the extreme propaganda, the corruption of news media, the vicious malice directed at sceptics all point to a massive political project. A project which must be vastly more important than some obviously dodgy climate predictions about a future which lies decades beyond the political horizon.

Energy security fits the bill even if it isn’t the whole story. Blend it with a bungling bureaucracy and a totalitarian ethos and in my view a plausible picture emerges. The only real problem is that with current technology, aiming to power the EU by wind, solar, biomass etc is bonkers.

Why do we always end up with bonkers?

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The Davey Lamp

Ed Davey has an opportunity to make his mark when the lights go out. He could lend his name to a simple non-electric lighting device – the Davey Lamp.




Made in China from recycled power station generators and lavishly plated in genuine Brassex, this retro style no-electric green lighting module is sure to add distinction to any benighted home.

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Tuesday, July 15, 2014

Foresight and pickled cucumbers


I made some pickled cucumbers yesterday. It doesn’t take long and they should be ready to eat in a few weeks. We enjoy home made pickles,  but for some reason don’t make them as often as we could. My pickled cucumber recipe is pretty old, so I suggest you go for something more modern, but it works fine for us.

To pickle Cucumbers fliced.
Pare thirty large cucumbers, flice them into a difh, take fix onions, flice and ftrew on them fome salt, fo cover them and let them ftand to drain twenty-four hours; make your pickle of white wine vinegar, nutmeg, pepper, cloves and mace, boil the fpices in the pickle, drain the liquor clear from the cucumbers, put them into a deep pot, pour the liquor [1] upon them boiling hot, and cover them very clofe; [2] when they are cold drain the liquor from them, give it another boil; and when it is cold pour it on them again; fo keep them for ufe.
Elizabeth Moxon – English Housewifery (1790)

[1] This of course refers to the vinegar pickling liquor.
[2] I finish here and omit the following step.

I don’t use thirty cucumbers because these days we can buy them all year round. Of course doughty old Liz Moxon was writing for those with the foresight and diligence to eke out a good crop of cucumbers to take them through the lean months of winter and early spring.

In those days, domestic foresight such as this was part of a middle class lifestyle and still not wholly unconnected with survival. In later decades the job would usually have been passed to a servant and later still a food manufacturer. 

I suppose it's the other side of economic progress and efficiency. It's easier and possibly cheaper to buy pickles rather than make your own. So everything is rosy apart from losing certain intangibles we've almost forgotten - such as the need for domestic foresight.

Oddly enough, foresight seems to be a problem doesn't it?

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Monday, July 14, 2014

A moment of luxury

Click to enlarge (Pic source)

Stow-on-the-Wold, heart of the Cotswolds and these days a tourist stop.

We grumbled about the variable temperature in the shower, yet less than 80 years ago, the town had no mains water, and modern drainage only two decades later:

"Stow was, until recent times, supplied with water from springs below the town. For centuries, women and children had carried water with yoke and bucket from the spring on Well Lane. Water carts plied between Well Lane and the town where the water was sold to the townsfolk at the price of a farthing a bucket. Several systems had been tried to force water up the hill including windmills, horse-mills and water wheels but all had failed. In 1871, Joseph Chamberlayne-Chamberlayne, lord of the manor, donated £2000 to the town for a deep well to be bored and this was a success. Mains water was laid on in 1937. Sewage disposal used numerous cavities in the rock, known locally as swillies, as natural soakaways under and around the houses until mains drainage was installed in 1958."

One of the wells on Well Lane (pic source)

We're living a life I didn't dream of as a child, driving from Birmingham to a beautiful place like this in an hour. For how much longer will many of us have cars and zoom round the country like pre-war landed gentry?

One of the charms of the town is its many little alleys (in York called snickelways). Stow's are particularly narrow and the man running the charity bric-à-brac explained that in the old times, when on market day the square might hold 30,000 sheep, the alleys made the wide-fleeced animals go in single file, which made them easier to count; hence the name of Fleece Alley.

Are we looking at the past, or the future?


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Sunday, July 13, 2014

Demise of the baby boomers

But things of which we have not had a direct intuition, which we have learned only through other people, we have no longer any opportunity, the time has passed in which we could inform our heart of them; its communications with reality are suspended; and so we cannot profit by the discovery, it is too late.
Marcel Proust - À la recherche du temps perdu

Recent deaths among my contemporaries yet again remind me that we baby boomers are on the way out. Not just in terms of mortality because there are a few decades to go yet, but in terms of influence.

So what have we achieved, we baby boomers?

For my part I prefer not to make a list. From the EU to windmills, from house prices to taxes to political liars it’s not likely to be a cheery one. Unfortunately, Proust was right about the value of direct experience too.

As genuine hardship becomes a distant memory, it isn’t easy to see where the vitality to change things will come from. If there is no real need to better oneself, then surely the vitality sags. We see many things in modern Britain, but vitality is not one of them.

So maybe that’s what we’ve done, we baby boomers. We’ve sucked the dear old place dry.

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Saturday, July 12, 2014

Does management justify its own costs?



Throughout history, the university systems of the world have evolved from a monastic model, through the industrial model as a driver of social mobility, to the latest, which is the ‘business’ model.
Like all models, this one has assumptions. In this case, the underlying but usually unstated one is that the faculty who teach and research, and the people who maintain the buildings, are not working hard enough.
The proposed solution is to add layers of middle managers, whose only contribution is to ‘motivate’ and generate policies to make everything ‘more efficient’.
The sad reality is that no amount of increased efficiency or hard work on the producers of the system can make up for the cost of this increased administration.
A cynic might argue that the only purpose of these changes is to provide jobs for those who can’t do anything productive.


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Friday, July 11, 2014

Do you veto yourself?

In his book Mind Time, Benjamin Libet raised the possibility that free will is not so much a free choice as a conscious veto on certain options as they bubble up from the unconscious. His experimental work was confined to motor control, but the idea is easily extended to wider issues of belief.

In other words, free will may not be a matter of freely choosing what to believe as freely choosing what not to believe - a conscious veto on social beliefs, opinions or narratives we have no wish to adopt.

If so, then belief simply implies that a conscious veto has not been exercised. Scepticism implies the opposite - a conscious veto has been exercised. In other words scepticism is the footprint of free will - belief leaves no footprint.

The idea is not new and of course it works both ways. If I veto any suggestion that the Earth is a sphere, then I may be exercising free will, but it is a ludicrous and intellectually damaging achievement. I suspect this may be one of the attractions of The Flat Earth Society – the free will aspect, the attractions of dissent.

Because there do seem to be attractions to scepticism and dissent. So much so that wholly conventional ideas are often presented as dissent – which in one sense they often are. The traditional politics of left and right for example. Both sides tend to use the language of dissent, often by inventing straw men - or straw women. It must feel like the cool breeze of intellectual freedom, even when no more than the other side of a numbing orthodoxy.

One obvious attraction of a broader and deeper scepticism is that the options are less constrained. Possibilities remain open, further analysis is always worthwhile. This seems to be the attraction of detachment. The veto is active and well developed, but also rounded by habits of introspection.

Should I accept this idea - or is there more to be understood? No I’ll pass for now - there is more to be understood.

The veto is transformed into a positive experience; an aspect of well-being, of a genial life lived apart from the rancour of intellectual passion and coercion.

If feels like free will – possibly because it is.

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Thursday, July 10, 2014

Bad business is good business


I'm reading Michael Crichton's "Airframe" (1996) and it contains a passage that has resonances far beyond the airline industry. Here, an accident investigator is telling a journalist about an explosion on an aircraft a few hours before: the operator had bought her company's excellent plane, but installed corroded second-hand engines, despite warnings.

"Super-cheap carriers are a stock scam."

"A stock scam?"

"Sure," Casey said. "You buy some aircraft so old and poorly maintained no reputable carrier will use them for spares. Then you subcontract maintenance to limit your liability. Then you offer cheap fares, and use the cash to buy new routes. It's a pyramid scheme but on paper it looks great. Volume's up, revenue's up, and Wall Street loves you. You're saving so much on maintenance that your earnings skyrocket. Your stock price doubles and doubles again. By the time the bodies start piling up, as you know they will, you've made your fortune off the stock, and can afford the best counsel. That's the genius of deregulation, Jack. When the bill comes, nobody pays.."

"Except the passengers."

Plea bargaining, court and regulator fines that come nowhere near the improper profits made, a couple in jail but hundreds and thousands of others untouched... it's not just banks, it's the way of the world.


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Wednesday, July 09, 2014

Frackquakes: evidence


"Did a train just go past?"

John Martin: The Great Day Of His Wrath

A professor of seismology links soaring seismic activity on Oklahoma to fracking; an industry-sponsored research association dismisses the effects as negligible.

(Htp: Chris Martenson's Peak Prosperity site).

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Tuesday, July 08, 2014

1984: progress update


http://4umi.com/orwell/1984/4

1. Michael Krieger (htp: Tyler Durden) discusses the effects of the new legislation requiring internet articles to be deleted (or de-listed) at the request of complainants.

2. Martin Armstrong (himself seemingly the victim of questionable use of state power) first discusses supposedly hack-proof web browsers for those who don't like being spied on - and then passes on a rumour that the NSA is targeting anyone who tries to download such browsers.

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Monday, July 07, 2014

Ukraine and Russia: as I said



Tyler Durden at Zero Hedge today (7 July):

"... As we remarked two weeks ago, when observing the recent developments surrounding the suddenly all-important South Stream gas pipeline bypassing Ukraine ...

"should Russia find a way to completely bypass Kiev as a traditional transit hub for Russian gas, it would make the country, and its ongoing civil war, completely irrelevant not only for Russia, but worse, for Europe, the IMF, and Ukraine's staunch western "supporters and allies" as well...

"[he quotes Itar-Tass] Gazprom.. aim to diversify routes for exporting natural gas and exclude transit risks..."

I differ slightly from Durden on the relevance of Ukraine, because (a) the Brotherhood line that feeds Blue Stream and the proposed South Stream, crosses Ukraine, (b) Soyuz and Blue Stream cross in eastern Ukraine, and (c) South Stream, a subspur of Blue Stream, will pass close to the southern shore of Crimea.

South and Blue Streams don't have enough capacity between them to completely compensate for the potential loss of  Brotherhood and Soyuz in central/western Ukraine, but it would be a start, provided S&B were made secure from seizure or destruction.

So from the Russian perspective, not only had Crimea to fall and remain in Russian hands, but the bitter struggle in eastern Ukraine must end with a stalemate somewhere west of those transiting energy lines:

 
why the extreme east of Ukraine is a key piece in the Russian strategy


As I was saying four months ago...

March 17: Naval infrastructure development on the Black Sea under the guise of Olympic preparation... strategic importance of South Stream pipeline... eastern Ukraine set for takeover ("...  South Stream crosses a bit of the extreme eastern part of Ukraine, but a little territorial snipping - a land purchase, maybe? - could put that right")... purchase of gas pipelines in Greece by proxy... and some further speculations...

March 19: Ukraine protests a pretext for Russian seizure of eastern Ukraine ("was the whole thing set up by Russia in the first place, to provoke a crisis aimed at the annexation of Crimea, near which will run the South Stream gas pipeline? - and possibly, in due course, eastern Ukraine, which is also predominantly Russian-speaking and across which runs Blue Stream?")... vulnerability of Russian gas and oil lines through Belarus and Ukraine... "some of the South Stream construction contracts were signed last Friday [March14]"... importance of Nord Stream also...

March 29: Historical struggle between US/EU and Russia for control of the Black Sea...

April 28: Russia's possible long-term strategy: an "eastern EU" centred on western Russia and connecting the Black and Caspian Seas, the Middle East and Asia.. Russia under heavy pressure to maintain economic momentum...


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All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.