The head of the Russian navy has said that a Mistral-class vessel could put as many troops in Georgia in 40 minutes as the Russian Black Sea Fleet took 26 hours to land during the nations' August 2008 war. Moscow declared the Russian-allied breakaway Georgian territory of Abkhazia an independent nation after the war and sent thousands of troops there. Russia, Georgia and Ukraine all have Black Sea coastlines, as does Abkhazia.
Phi Beta Iota: Berto Jongman flagged this from the Small Wars Journal. It is consistent with our own earlier diagnosis of Cognitive Dissonance, and we recommend it be read in its entirety. At the link below can be found a link to the original slide show. The author stresses the reasonable gravity of the conflict between being a Muslim and being asked to kill other Muslims, and while he avoids recommending a policy, we do not. DoD has been culturally ignorant for too long. It's time we brought both DoD human resource management and DoD counterintelligence into the 21st Century. See also:
GS a short? And five reasons we hate Goldman Sachs
Cody Willard November 19, 2009
Here are five reasons why we want Goldman Sachs destroyed and buried so we can dance on its grave and why these crony apologists are wrong when they say that the “populist outrage at Goldman Sachs is misplaced”.
1. The AIG bailout was a covert bailout of Goldman and we want our money back.
2. Goldman became a “financial holding company” after it became a “bank holding company”after it realized it was going to be insolvent even after it got Stephen Friedman to write them a $13 billion check from AIG funded with taxpayer money.
As you watch this airplane, look at the canards moving along side of, and just below the canopy rail. The “canards” are the small wings forward of the main wings? The smoke and contrails provide a sense of the actual flight path, sometimes in reverse direction. This video is of an in-flight demonstration flown by the Russian's 30MK fighter aircraft. You will not believe what you are about to see. The fighter can stall from high speed, stopping forward motion in seconds. (full stall). Then it demonstrates an ability to descend tail first without causing a compressor stall. It can also recover from a flat spin in less than a minute.
These maneuver capabilities don't exist in any other aircraft in the world today.. Take a look at the video with the sound up. This aircraft is of concern to U.S and NATO planners. We don't know which nations will soon be flying the SU-30MK, hopefully China isn't one of them.
Hundreds of emails leaked from the internal computer system of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia show how a small group of highly influential senior British and U.S. scientists have for years been secretly discussing ways in which their evidence could be manipulated to make the threat posed by global warming sound much worse than it is.
To place the significance of these revelations into context, let us recall how exactly a year ago, Parliament passed, virtually unopposed, what was far and away the most expensive new law ever put before it. On the Government's own figures, the Climate Change Act is going to cost Britain £18 billion a year – that's £720 for every household in the country – every year from now until 2050.
WASHINGTON — The United States government is financing its more than trillion-dollar-a-year borrowing with i.o.u.’s on terms that seem too good to be true. But that happy situation, aided by ultralow interest rates, may not last much longer. Treasury officials now face a trifecta of headaches: a mountain of new debt, a balloon of short-term borrowings that come due in the months ahead, and interest rates that are sure to climb back to normal as soon as the Federal Reserve decides that the emergency has passed.
‘A government report on the bailout of A.I.G. is must reading for taxpayers looking to know why the $182 billion “rescue” is the most troubling episode of the financial disaster.') … The Fed, under Mr. Geithner’s direction, caved in to A.I.G.’s counterparties, giving them 100 cents on the dollar for positions that would have been worth far less if A.I.G. had defaulted. Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Société Générale and other banks were in the group that got full value for their contracts when many others were accepting fire-sale prices.
WASHINGTON — Suddenly the Federal Reserve is everybody's punching bag. … Strip the Fed of its bank regulation powers, some in Congress are demanding. Get probing audits of its behind-the-scenes operations, others say.
Christopher Ketcham has written for Vanity Fair, Harper’s, GQ, the Nation, Salon, Mother Jones, Men’s Journal, Good Magazine, Radar, National Geographic, Hustler, Penthouse, Maxim, FHM and many other magazines, newspapers and websites. He divides his time between Brooklyn, New York, and Moab, Utah, where he writes more poetry than is publishable or readable. In 2002, he was selected as a Livingston Awards finalist for his Salon.com coverage of the 9/11 attacks in New York. In 2004, he published a book of poetry about September 11, which Norman Mailer declared “the best book I never got. Can you re-send?” A 2006 article in New York Press, “The Dogs of Gowanus,” has recently been optioned for a feature film.
1) Time Magazine recently ran a profile on the 2nd Maine Militia, which is headed up by the wonderful novelist (and all-around sweet-hearted lady) Carolyn Chute (check out her most recent book, The School on Heart’s Content Road). Choice line from one of the 2nd Mainers at their annual meeting: “Fuck America. What have they done for us lately? Let’s cut the United States loose and let it drift downstream.” Indeed.
2) For those of you dosing on the swine flu vaccine, see “Swine Fools” in CounterPunch.
3) CounterPunch also found the space to publish my profile of ex-CIA operative Bob Baer, the veteran Middle East case officer and author whose books became the basis of the film Syriana. See “Unlearning the CIA”. A sample:
