patience sheeple; death and flag waving are not far off now.....,

Apparently I'm not the only one.

Simon Jenkins fundamentally gets it.

The world is showing alarming parallels with the 1930s. Lights are turning to red as the world again approaches depression. The credit crunch and the collapse of world trade talks are making nations introverted. Meanwhile, the defeated power of the last war, Russia, is flexing its muscles and finding them in good working order[...] Has the West misjudged the fault line of an impending conflict? Its global strategy under George Bush, Tony Blair and a ham-fisted Nato has declared the threat to world peace as coming from nonstate organisations, specifically Al-Qaeda, and the nations that give them either bases or tacit support. Western generals and securocrats have elevated these anarchist fanatics to the status of nuclear powers. Policing crime has become “waging war”, so as to justify soaring budgets and influence over policy, much as did America’s military-industrial complex during the cold war.

Might it be that a raging seven-year obsession with Osama Bin Laden and his tiny Al-Qaeda organisation has blinded strategists to the old verities? Wars are rarely “clashes of civilisation”, but rather clashes of interest. They are usually the result of careless policy, of misread signals and of mission creep closing options for peace.

Terrorists, wherever located and trained, can certainly capture headlines and cause overnight mayhem, but they cannot project power. They cannot conquer countries or peoples, only manipulate democratic regimes into espousing illiberal policies, as in America and Britain. By grossly overstating the significance of terrorism, western leaders have distracted foreign policy from what should be its prime concern: securing world peace by holding a balance of interest - and pride - among the great powers.

spoke too soon.....,

The NYTimes goes to great lengths to deny that race is a pivotal issue. The Race Isn’t About Race and Accentuate the Negative - we'll start with Krugman;

And the McCain campaign, after initially mumbling something about how Mr. Obama eats arugula, quickly resorted to its all-purpose answer: you can’t criticize the candidate because he’s a former P.O.W. Maybe the campaign hopes that the Obama people will fall into a reflexive cringe, the same way they did when Wesley Clark made the entirely reasonable point that having been a P.O.W., while it makes you a hero, doesn’t necessarily qualify you to become president.

Assuming that the Obama campaign isn’t scared off by the P.O.W. thing, can it really win in an exchange of character attacks? Probably not — but it doesn’t have to.

The central fact of this year’s election is that voters are fed up with Republican rule. The only way Mr. McCain can win the presidential race is if it becomes a contest of personalities rather than parties — and if his campaign can instill in voters the perception that Mr. Obama is a suspicious character while Mr. McCain is a fine, upstanding gentleman.

The Obama campaign, on the other hand, doesn’t need to convince voters either that he’s the awesomest candidate ever or that Mr. McCain is a villain. All it has to do is tarnish Mr. McCain’s image enough so that voters see this as a race between a Democrat and a Republican. And that’s a race the Democrat will easily win.

and then go back to Bai, whose claims are a priori somewhat more ridiculous.

The only hitch in this plan is that there’s plenty of reason to think that Mr. Obama’s race is not the insurmountable detriment to his candidacy that a lot of anxious observers believe it is.

The theory that race is holding back Mr. Obama’s candidacy rests on a pretty simple premise. Adherents argue that the Democratic candidate ought to be effortlessly leading by double digits in the polls at this point — and that his failure to do so can only be explained by latent racism among older voters.

After all, this thinking goes, the Republican president suffers from abysmal approval ratings, and even half-witted voters should be able to see that Mr. Obama is a superior candidate to Mr. McCain, were their views not clouded by race.

These are flawed assumptions, however. While it’s entirely possible that Mr. Obama’s race is costing him some support, it’s also true that the electorate that voted in the last two presidential elections was almost symmetrically divided between the two parties. It would defy the laws of politics if, at this early stage of the campaign, moderate Republicans and conservative independents were to reject Mr. McCain (a candidate many of them preferred back in 2000) simply because they don’t like George W. Bush.

Inability to face superficial facts does not bode well for the prospect of facing substantive facts. So many folks caught up in the minutiae of political theater, that they never even consider the cool and calculating hand of the man behind the curtain orchestrating the entire production with an eye to simple governance continuity.

No one mentions race.....,

In the Observer - US elections: Why has Obama stalled? On the eve of the Democrats' convention in Denver, Barack Obama finds himself struggling against a resurgent John McCain. Why isn't Obama doing better in the polls? There is one answer no one wants to hear. Paul Harris reports on how race has become the great unspoken issue in the campaign for the White House - and why it may yet be the decisive factor;

The Democrats are starting to struggle in a presidential race which they should be dominating. America is beset by economic troubles, mired in an unpopular foreign war and facing an unpopular Republican party. A stunning 80 per cent of Americans think that the country is heading in the wrong direction. Yet Obama and McCain are virtually tied in the polls. The possible explanations are multiple. The Democratic campaign is being daily assaulted by withering Republican attack ads. At the same time, there are still deep scars in the party left by the ferocious battle between Obama and Senator Hillary Clinton.

And then there is the issue of race. It gets much less attention than the battle with Clinton, or the daily barbs traded with McCain, or Obama's struggle to rise in the polls. Yet it might provide the key to understanding the strange inability of the Obama campaign to achieve lift-off in the polls.

'The question of this election is race. The answer we are looking for is, how much will it matter?' said Professor Shawn Bowler, a political scientist at the University of California at Riverside. America will soon find out. When Obama speaks on Thursday to more than 80,000 people in Denver's football stadium he will also reach a television audience of millions of Americans. They will look into the face of a man who could be their next President and for the first time it will be a black face.

America will finally be facing up to the question that truly defines the 2008 presidential race: is America ready to elect a black President to the White House?

Crash Course Chapter Seventeen: Peak Oil

Consistent with the high quality of the previous chapters. Click on the image to view.

Change Before It’s Too Late

Frank Rich gets it too.

1. Is a man who is just discovering the Internet qualified to lead a restoration of America’s economic and educational infrastructures?
2. Is the leader of a virtually all-white political party America’s best salesman and moral avatar in the age of globalization?
3. Does a bellicose Vietnam veteran who rushed to hitch his star to the self-immolating overreaches of Ahmad Chalabi, Pervez Musharraf and Mikheil Saakashvili have the judgment to keep America safe?

How we dig out of this quagmire is the American story that Obama must tell. It is not a story of endless conflicts abroad but a potentially inspiring tale of serious economic, educational, energy and health-care mobilization at home. We don’t have the time or resources to go off on more quixotic military missions or to indulge in culture wars. (In China, they’re too busy exploiting scientific advances for competitive advantage to reopen settled debates about Darwin.) Americans must band together for change before the new century leaves us completely behind. The Obama campaign actually has plans, however imperfect or provisional, to set us on that path; the McCain campaign offers only disposable Band-Aids typified by the “drill now” mantra that even McCain says will only have a “psychological” effect on gas prices.

Even as it points to America’s future, the Obama campaign also has the duty to fill in its opponent’s past. McCain’s attacks on Obama have worked: in last week’s Los Angeles Times-Bloomberg poll, Obama’s favorable rating declined from 59 to 48 percent and his negative rating rose from 27 to 35. Yet McCain still has a lower positive rating (46 percent) and higher negative rating (38) than Obama. McCain is not nearly as popular among Americans, it turns out, as he is among his journalistic camp followers. Should voters actually get to know him, he has nowhere to go but down.

The argument against Obama’s “going negative” is that it undermines his message of “transcendent politics” and will make him look like an “angry black man.” But pacifistic politics is an oxymoron, and Obama is constitutionally incapable of coming off angrier than McCain. A few more fisticuffs from the former law professor (and many more from his running mate and other surrogates) can only help make him look less skinny (metaphorically if not literally). Obama should go after McCain’s supposedly biggest asset — experience — much as McCain went after Obama’s crowd-drawing celebrity.

It is, after all, not mere happenstance that so many conservative pundits — Rich Lowry, Peggy Noonan, Ramesh Ponnuru — have, to McCain’s irritation, proposed that he “patriotically” declare in advance that he will selflessly serve only a single term. Whatever their lofty stated reasons for promoting this stunt, their underlying message is clear: They recognize in their heart of hearts that the shelf life of McCain’s experience has already reached its expiration date.

Is a man who is just discovering the Internet qualified to lead a restoration of America’s economic and educational infrastructures? Is the leader of a virtually all-white political party America’s best salesman and moral avatar in the age of globalization? Does a bellicose Vietnam veteran who rushed to hitch his star to the self-immolating overreaches of Ahmad Chalabi, Pervez Musharraf and Mikheil Saakashvili have the judgment to keep America safe?

R.I.P., “Change We Can Believe In.” The fierce urgency of the 21st century demands Change Before It’s Too Late.

drill! Drill! DRILL!

Americans don't like uncertainty.

Americans don't like any suggestion that they must live within any sort of limits.

Americans don't particularly care about the environment, especially when it threatens their lifestyle.

Americans won't endure anyone telling them that their behaviors are selfish, irresponsible and wrong.

"Drill here, Drill now, Pay less" is a lie for those who prefer hearing lies rather than dealing with the truth.

What is the truth? The truth is contained in these charts:

No one of a conservative mindset will understand these charts or what they depict.

They want cheap gasoline

They are entitled to cheap gasoline forever

They will vote for the candidate who promises cheap gasoline forever.

What John McCain knows is that the American people do not have any sort of knowledge about energy nor any appetite to learn.

drill, Drill, DRILL! appeals to the desperation of the simple-minded ignorant.

Lies such as two trillion barrels of oil shale plus billions and billions under the Arctic are perfectly well suited to the American masses.

You've allowed John McCain to use the energy issue to steal your momentum and erase your lead in the polls. McCain told America that we needed to explore all our options to solve the energy crisis, including drilling offshore. He said that you disagreed. He summed up his argument in a powerful little phrase: "Drill here and drill now."

Brilliant!

Yes, I know. It's a gimmick. The relatively small amount of oil that we may find by punching more holes in the floor of the Gulf wouldn't be seen for years.

Furthermore, we have to come to terms with the fact that we are running out of oil anyway. We may be able to push back our day of reckoning, but it's coming. According to the Energy Information administration, our domestic production has fallen 40 percent since 1985, and not for lack of drilling. Since 2000, the number of exploratory and developmental wells has nearly doubled, while crude production has continued to slip.

We have to slake our thirst for crude and invest immediately and aggressively in alternative energy sources.

In spite of all this, people still took the drilling bait. Why?

Because it was concise, catchy and positive. That's the formula. I thought that you understood this, you of the "Yes We Can!" slogan and all. But, apparently not.

Lately, you've demonstrated an unsettling penchant for overly nuanced statements that meander into the cerebral.

Earth to Barack: to Main Street America, nuance equals confusion.

Holla at yo boy Charles Blow before it's too late Baraka....,

Batman and Rush: Why McCain Will Win

This election has already been decided. It's over. The winner is John McCain - according to Jeffrey Lord in The American Spectator. Let's go directly to the moneyshot - Lord's brash conclusion;

Does Batman really care what others think of him? Does Rush? Did Reagan or Teddy Roosevelt? Are you kidding? In other words, every time the media thinks they are promoting Obama they are in fact doing him damage. Subtle, yet irreversible damage that will eventually begin to show itself in the polling numbers if it hasn't already.

What will Americans be voting for in 2008? The same thing they have been voting for routinely in every election since the beginning of American presidential elections. They want action. A willingness to risk. They want someone who doesn't give a damn what others think.

They want Batman. They want Rush.

So they will elect McCain.

Interesting. But far more interesting still is the underlying rationale leading Lord to this conclusion;

What is it that makes Americans choose anything the way they do? And specifically what does this mean when it comes to choosing presidents?

First, he explained to me, we should understand that every human has a brain divided into three parts. The cortex is the seat of logic, while the limbic deals with emotions. It is what he calls the "third brain" -- the "reptilian brain" -- that unmistakably dominates the other two. It houses a person's fundamental instinct for two and only two things: survival and reproduction. While every human walking the planet has these two instincts, some people are more "reptilian" than others. Those others could be depending more on their "cortex" -- the part of the brain that is home to logic, that controls intelligence. Or they can seem to run mostly on emotion. Yet without question, the research shows again and again that whether the subject is picking cars, coffee or presidents, people respond with their instincts. When this fact of life is overlaid with culture -- in the case of voters for president of the United States, American culture -- the result is easy to see.

While other cultures put a premium on thinking (the French) or order (the Germans), Americans want our presidents to respond just as we do in our culture -- with their gut. An American presidential candidate, Rapaille says, "doesn't need to be extremely reptilian, only more reptilian than his opponent is." In particular, and he says this in terms of a cultural observation as opposed to a subjective condemnation, Americans are not culturally disposed to thinking. We prefer, as the Nike commercial has long said, to "just do it." We are a culture of action, of rebellion, of instinct. When Europeans or American liberals deride a George W. Bush or a Reagan as a "cowboy," they think they are hurling an insult. Yet most Americans see cowboys as heroes, so the insult effectively backfires. When it comes to choosing between two candidates for president, we gravitate instinctively to the one perceived as more "reptilian." Rapaille puts it this way: "We don't want our presidents to think too much."

And that my friends, is exactly the way it is. Not that I believe the popular mandate and the selected manager of federal executive branch operations is the final arbiter and shot caller, but as a windsock for public opinion - he ABSOLUTELY serves a critical role for TPTB who must guage, assuage, and ultimately co-opt the political will of the masses.

The Misshapen Mind

How the Brain's Haphazard Evolution Left Us with Self-Destructive Instincts;

A kluge, Marcus tells us, is an improvised engineering response to a problem. It is the product of a tinkerer playing around with odds and ends and creating a functional machine. That, he writes, is what the brain and its package of emotional, intellectual, and logical tools is. It is a series of good but imperfect methods for processing and acting on information, developed over hundreds of millions of years.

Evolution, in other words, produces things that work. That, Marcus argues, is the case with the brain, with how we store memories and how we respond to information. Were our memory systems better designed, they'd store and retrieve memories in the same way computers do. Instead, we rely on context to access snapshots from the past. Moving beyond memory, the logical aspect of higher thought is simply the icing on the cake, Marcus explains -- something that has evolved in an evolutionary microsecond and set up residence in the brain's frontal lobes. The older parts of the brain, call them our reptilian legacy, had much longer to mature. As a result, in many situations, especially when quick responses are demanded, they simply overwhelm our rational side, stampeding us into actions that don't really stand up to serious analysis.

Thus, we see an act of violence in the media (whether it be a single person being kidnapped and murdered, as with the 1993 celebrated Polly Klaas case in California, or mass slaughter, as with September 11), and we respond with a potpourri of inchoate fear, panic, and rage. We feel that the certainties governing our lives have been shattered. Rarely do we successfully step back and analyze the likelihood or unlikelihood of such an event impacting us.

For both Marcus and Gardner, the result is the emergence of an increasingly irrational political system, a sort of Truman Show in which reality is continually altered by an omnipresent media superstructure.

and THAT - ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, is precisely what we seek to resolve, not as in "cure", rather, simply to bring into focus so that it becomes first nature for you to spot it and remember it wherever you encounter it. Liminality is as easy as falling out of bed, once you've accustomed yourself to its terms. Always and everywhere, remember yourself.....,

Georgian Endgame

Ramzy Baroud gives a great synopsis in his article The Saakashvili Experiment;

It's rather interesting how a controversial and unpopular plan that has raised the ire of the Polish people -- 70 per cent of the country is against it -- was overcome within days of war and is now embraced as a necessary deterrent. One cannot help but question the relationship between the decision to invade South Ossetia, which was certain to compel some Russian response, and the rush to embrace Bush's military designs in that region. The plan to place missiles in Poland seemed like a resounding failure as late as last month when US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice "tried and failed just before leaving for Europe on Monday [7 July] to seal a deal to place missiles in Poland, the State Department said," according to CNN. Now Poland is all for it. It return, Poland would receive US assistance in overhauling its military, reminiscent of the Israeli-US efforts in aiding Georgia's military, which emboldened the latter to pursue war with Russia.

While Russia's decisive response to Saakashvili's war may have temporarily reaffirmed Russia's military readiness, it has already provided the needed justification for greater US-NATO intervention in Georgia, Poland, the Czech Republic and elsewhere. That US presence might be welcomed by the unnerved "democratic" leaders of these states but it will pique the fury of Russia, whose political radars are intercepting the Bush administration's every move in the region with great alarm.

The ceasefire between Russia and Georgia, achieved through French mediation, will hardly be the end of the new Cold War underway in an area too accustomed to cold wars. The fact is that Russia will fight to break away from the pro- US ring of former Soviet states that promise to undermine its influence in a Eurasia, and the US will do its utmost to maintain a level of tension, if not hostilities in the region, for without it neither a missile shield nor the 270 billion barrels of oil in the Caspian basin can be brought within Washington's reach.

I think it's important to understand and carefully reflect on the fact that the U.S. ventured nothing and lost nothing in this experiment. As a matter of fact, it can easily be argued, as Baroud has done, that western oligarchs gained strategic ground in the wake of this little experiment.

Food crisis: Indians asked to try rats

PATNA: A state government in eastern India is encouraging people to eat rats in an effort to battle soaring food prices and save grain stocks.

Authorities in Bihar, one of India’s poorest states, are asking rich and poor alike to switch to eating rats in a bid to reduce the dependence on rice. They even plan to offer rats on restaurant menus.

“Eating of rats will serve twin purposes — it will save grains from being eaten away by rats and will simultaneously increase our grain stock,” said Vijay Prakash, an official from the state’s welfare department.

Officials say almost 50 per cent of India’s food grains stocks are eaten away by rodents in fields or warehouses.

Jitan Ram Manjhi, Bihar’s caste and tribe welfare minister, said rat meat was a healthy alternative to expensive rice or grains, and should be eaten by one and all. “We are very serious to implement this project since the food crisis is turning serious day by day,” said Manjhi, who has eaten rats.

In Bihar, rat meat is already eaten by Mushars, a group of lower caste Hindus, as well as poorer sections of society.—Reuters

The next credit crunch

In Fortune/CNN;

Last year, just as the subprime crisis happened, credit card debt took off. The home-equity ATM had been shut down, so people turned to the last source of easy money they had left, the most expensive debt on the menu, credit card borrowing.

Since credit card debt has been growing much faster than the economy - more than 8% in last year's third and fourth quarters and over 7% in May (the most recent month reported)- people are apparently using it as a substitute for income. Thus, for the past year or so we have still maintained the standard-of-living illusion.

So now what? It's hard to see where consumers can turn next. Home prices seem highly unlikely to start rising again soon. Stocks? You never know, but the Great Bull Market looks like a once-in-a-lifetime event. Homes and stocks are households' biggest asset classes by far. There isn't much else to borrow against.

It may be that the standard-of-living bubble finally has to deflate. Sustainable increases in living standards have to be earned, not borrowed, and that means performing ever higher value work that can't be outsourced. We haven't been meeting that challenge very well; doing so will probably require much more and better education for millions of Americans, which takes time and money.

The result may feel like deprivation, but I don't see it that way. Who knows - we might even find that living within our means and saving a little money actually isn't so bad.

The Great Consumer Crash of 2009

How Did I Get Here

And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself-Well...How did I get here?

And you may ask yourself
Where is that large automobile?
And you may tell yourself
This is not my beautiful house!
And you may tell yourself
This is not my beautiful wife!

- Talking Heads, David Byrne lyrics to Once in a Lifetime

oops, I almost forgot - here's the article

The Mindlessness is Total Are You Ready for Nuclear War?

Paul Craig Roberts (PCR) was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions. Never one to stutter, PCR's been bringing it hotter than cayenne pepper for the past couple months.

Today, Reagan is gone. The Republican Establishment is gone. There are no conservative power centers, only neoconservative power centers closely allied with Israel, which uses the billions of dollars funneled into Israeli coffers by US taxpayers to influence US elections and foreign policy.

The Republican candidate for president is a warmonger. There are no checks remaining in the Republican Party on the neocons’ proclivity for war. What Republican constituencies oppose war? Can anyone name one?

The Democrats are not much better, but they have some constituencies that are not enamored of war in order to establish US world hegemony. The Rapture Evangelicals, who fervently desire Armageddon, are not Democrats; nor are the brainwashed Brownshirts desperate to vent their frustrations by striking at someone, somewhere, anywhere.

I get emails from these Brownshirts and attest that their hate-filled ignorance is extraordinary. They are all Republicans, and yet they think they are conservatives. They have no idea who I am, but since I criticize the Bush Regime and America’s belligerent foreign policy, they think I am a “liberal commie pinko.”

The only literate sentence this legion of fools has ever managed is: “If you hate America so much, why don’t you move to Cuba!”

Such is the current state of a Reagan political appointee in today’s Republican Party. He is a “liberal commie pinko” who should move to Cuba.

The Republicans will get us into more wars. Indeed, they live for war. McCain is preaching war for 100 years. For these warmongers, it is like cheering for your home team. Win at all costs. They get a vicarious pleasure out of war. If the US has to tell lies in order to attack countries, what’s wrong with that? “If we don’t kill them over there, they will kill us over here.”

The mindlessness is total.

By all means, go to Counterpunch and read the whole thing. PCR does a fair amount of recent historical "talking out of class". I always love it when that happens.....,

NATO is Useless...,

NATO is useless. It has failed to bring stability to Afghanistan, as it failed to bring it to Serbia. It just breaks crockery. Nato has proved a rotten fighting force, which in Kabul is on the brink of being sidelined by exasperated Americans. Nor is it any better at diplomacy: witness its hamfisted handling of east Europe. As the custodian of the west's postwar resistance to the Soviet Union's nuclear threat it served a purpose. Now it has become a diplomats' Olympics, irrelevant but with bursts of extravagant self-importance.

Yesterday's Nato ministerial meeting in Brussels was a fig leaf over the latest fiasco, the failure to counter the predictable Russian intervention in Georgia. Ostensibly to save Russian nationals in South Ossetia, the intervention was, in truth, to tell Georgia and Ukraine that they must not play games with the west along Russia's frontier. Nato, which Russia would (and should) have joined after the collapse of the Soviet Union, is now a running provocation along the eastern rim of Europe.

There was no strategic need for Nato to proselytise for members, and consequent security guarantees, among the Baltic republics and border states to the south. Nor is there any strategic need for the US to place missile sites in Poland or the Czech Republic. This was mere Nato self-aggrandisement reinforcing the lobbying of the Pentagon hawks.

These moves were bound to infuriate the hypersensitive Russians, and did. There is no point in western pundits saying that the thrust of Nato close to the Russian border is quite different from the cold war location of Soviet missiles in Cuba. It seems the same to Russian nationalists.

Nor is it any good pundits remarking that Russia's defence of Russian minorities in Georgia is quite different from Nato's intervention to defend the Kurdish minority in Iraq or the Albanian minority in Serbia. Again, that is just how it seems to Russia.

George Bush said earlier this month that "the age of spheres of influence is over". In that case why push that most potent sphere of influence, Nato, to the Russian border? And what of the sphere-of-influence theory that underpinned Bush's neoconservative plan to conquer the Muslim world for democracy?

In Europe, as in Asia, Nato leaves a trail of catastrophe This outdated military alliance is playing with fire in Russia. In Pakistan and Afghanistan it is playing with dynamite. Strong stuff in the UK Guardian.

Cyber-nonsense in the News...,

This is NOT hacking. Some nitwit left controls on a PBX exposed to call in usurpation. There are no skills involved with doing this, just a little basic knowledge of phone systems and it goes back more than 25 years, not the 10-15 mentioned in the article. Something like this merely highlights the dubious competence of folks running things in this agency and this department;

A hacker broke into a Homeland Security Department telephone system over the weekend and racked up about $12,000 in calls to the Middle East and Asia.

The hacker made more than 400 calls on a Federal Emergency Management Agency voicemail system in Emmitsburg, Md., on Saturday and Sunday, according to FEMA spokesman Tom Olshanski.

FEMA is part of Homeland Security, which in 2003 put out a warning about this very vulnerability.

The voicemail system is new and recently was installed. It is a Private Branch Exchange, or PBX, a traditional corporate phone network that is used in thousands of companies and government offices. Many companies are moving to a higher tech version, known as Voice Over Internet Telephony.

This type of hacking is very low-tech and "old school," said John Jackson, a St. Louis-based security consultant. It was popular 10 to 15 years ago. Telecommunications security administrators now know to configure security settings, such as having individual users create unique passwords and not continue to use the password assigned to users in the initial setup.

"In this case it's sort of embarrassing that it happened to FEMA themselves — FEMA being a child of DHS, with calls going to the Middle East," Johnson said.

Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, India and Yemen are among the countries calls were made to, Olshanski said. Most of the calls were about three minutes long, but some were as long as 10 minutes.

Sprint caught the fraud over the weekend and halted all outgoing long-distance calls from FEMA's National Emergency Training Center in Emmitsburg.

FEMA's chief information officer is investigating who hacked into the system and where exactly the calls were placed to. At this point it appears a "hole" was left open by the contractor when the voicemail system was being upgraded, Olshanski said. Olshanski did not know who the contractor was or what hole specifically was left open, but he assured the hole has since been closed.

In 2003, Homeland Security and the FBI investigated multiple reports about private industry being breached by these types of hackers.

"This illegal activity enables unauthorized individuals anywhere in the world to communicate via compromised U.S. phone systems in a way that is difficult to trace," according to a department information bulletin from June 3, 2003.

Back in the day, poor students used to abuse these misconfigured PBX's all the time using exactly this lack of administrative control to place long distance calls to home.

Politics

Cuba's emerging leverage

When US Congress approved some US$42 million in aid destined to Cuba on 22 July, it was a concrete signal. Relations between the two countries are likely to improve over time despite the staunchly anti-Castro contingent that retains a powerful voting block in southern Florida.

Raul Castro is well aware of this future. And while he is willing to play hard ball with Washington, he knows the potential FDI upshot from the US could be beneficial to his people, Cuba's economy, and ultimately his regime.

Raul is also aware that Russia is keen to improve relations. His three-day visit with Sachin erased any doubt that Moscow is eager to invest in Cuba's energy and medical resources. Havana has long been interested in becoming a refining hub in the region, and is eager to complete the LUKoil deal to have the Russian energy firm refine Venezuelan heavy crude for domestic use and, perhaps, export to the US.

Cuba is in the middle with each hand on two heavy geopolitical levers. By applying the right amount of pressure, the country can certainly benefit from both relationships. Too much pressure on either side, and Cuba risks losing one or both connections. In the end, however, the island nation will stick to its historical roots – maintain sovereignty and some dignity no matter what the cost.

"Cuba's attitude is 'We'll take your money, but that doesn't mean we'll do what you want,'" Erikson said, adding, "Frankly, I don't see Russian power projection in the Caribbean or in the rest of Latin America." International Relations and Security Network.

Drawball

Technological Fundamentalism in Media and Culture

Robert Jensen; While media watchdogs and bloggers probe contemporary news media for signs of bias -- from every angle, on virtually every issue -- perhaps the most important of journalists’ biases is ignored: their routine acceptance of society’s technological fundamentalism. This devotion to the industrial world’s core delusion shows up not just in stories about science and technology but in the assumptions about science and technology that underlie virtually all reporting in the corporate commercial news media in the United States.

Let’s start with definitions: While fundamentalism has a specific meaning in Protestant history (an early 20th century movement to promote “The Fundamentals”), more generally the term can be used to describe any intellectual/political/theological position that asserts certainty in the unquestioned truth and/or righteousness of a belief system. Fundamentalism shows up in history often enough, in enough places, that it seems to be a feature not of a particular culture but of human psychology -- we humans are prone, though one hopes not doomed, to fundamentalist thinking. The attraction of fundamentalism is not hard to understand; in a maddeningly complex world, such a way of thinking can offer comfort, even if illusory. But fundamentalism is better described as a system of non-thought, for as ecologist Wes Jackson puts it, “fundamentalism takes over where thought leaves off.”

Journalists are conscious of religious fundamentalism and treat it as a phenomenon to be covered, even if they don’t always explore it in much depth. But other fundamentalisms -- which likely are even more dangerous than the religious varieties -- are the water in which journalists swim, rarely reported upon and usually taken as an unquestioned state of nature. This includes national fundamentalism (the belief that we owe loyalty to nation-states and that patriotism is a good thing) and market fundamentalism (the belief that market-based corporate capitalism is the only rational way to organize an economy in the contemporary world).

But it may well turn out that the gravest threat to a just and sustainable human presence on the planet is technological fundamentalism -- the notion that the increasing use of increasingly more sophisticated high-energy advanced technology is always a good thing and that any problems caused by the unintended consequences of such technology eventually can be remedied by more technology. According to David Orr, an environmental studies professor at Oberlin College in Ohio, technological fundamentalists are those “unwilling, perhaps unable, to question our basic assumptions about how our tools relate to our larger purposes and prospects.”

BD-Vision

Backchannel, Big Don has hipped me to the apocalyptic blip coloring his interpretation of the national security data currently registering on his far-reaching cognitive event horizon. Once you know what Big Don knows, see, what Big Don sees - I think you'll be slapping your head in consternation for having ever doubted his probity and resolve.

Muslims with intercontinental nuke delivery capability...

What I (and all you other SR readers unable to get with the BD program) clearly fail to appreciate is the extent to which our correspondent is presciently channeling Paul Baran (minus the technical skills and inventiveness) but with all the requisite fear, dread, and benefit of 20/20 historical insight.

BD scrys not only the clear and present danger of the Islamic bomb - going beyond this - he's pointing us toward the unthinkable possibility of intercontinental ballistic delivery of the same!!!

Coupled with political subversion from within by a Manchurian candidate like Baraka Hussein - who stands ready to turn over the lion's share of BD's hard earned tax dollars to the internal "golden horde" of OOW overbreeding useless eaters - and you have all the makings of a nightmarish future state unfit for the genetically advantaged spawn of Big Don. Clearly not an acceptable turn of sociopolitical events.

Meet the Economist Who Thinks We're Doomed

For months Roubini has been arguing that the true cost of the housing crisis will not be a mere $300 billion -- the amount allowed for by the housing legislation sponsored by Representative Barney Frank and Senator Christopher Dodd -- but something between a trillion and a trillion and a half dollars. But most important, in Roubini's opinion, is to realize that the problem is deeper than the housing crisis. "Reckless people have deluded themselves that this was a subprime crisis," he told me. "But we have problems with credit-card debt, student-loan debt, auto loans, commercial real estate loans, home-equity loans, corporate debt and loans that financed leveraged buyouts." All of these forms of debt, he argues, suffer from some or all of the same traits that first surfaced in the housing market: shoddy underwriting, securitization, negligence on the part of the credit-rating agencies and lax government oversight. "We have a subprime financial system," he said, "not a subprime mortgage market."

Roubini argues that most of the losses from this bad debt have yet to be written off, and the toll from bad commercial real estate loans alone may help send hundreds of local banks into the arms of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. "A good third of the regional banks won't make it," he predicted. In turn, these bailouts will add hundreds of billions of dollars to an already gargantuan federal debt, and someone, somewhere, is going to have to finance that debt, along with all the other debt accumulated by consumers and corporations. "Our biggest financiers are China , Russia and the gulf states ," Roubini noted. "These are rivals, not allies."

The United States, Roubini went on, will likely muddle through the crisis but will emerge from it a different nation, with a different place in the world. "Once you run current-account deficits, you depend on the kindness of strangers," he said, pausing to let out a resigned sigh. "This might be the beginning of the end of the American empire." Today in Alternet.

Information Warfare?

Ordinary Americans critical of one-sided media. The conflict may be over, but not the war of words. Moscow claims some Western newspapers have taken a one-sided view of the Georgian-South Ossetian conflict and have been misleading their readers. War moves from battleground to broadcasting studio. The South Ossetian conflict managed to dominate the airwaves at a time when viewers should have been hooked on the Olympic Games rather than horrified by images of war. Georgia's PR campaign throughout the conflict has been directed towards the West, portraying Russia as the aggressor.

Russian English-language television channel Russia Today has acused the U.S. broadcaster CNN of using the wrong pictures in their coverage of the conflict in South Ossetia. A Russian cameraman says footage of wrecked tanks and ruined buildings, which was purported to have been filmed in the town of Gori, in fact showed the South Ossetian capital Tskhinvali, the RTTV reported on its web site.

Gori was said to be about to fall under the control of the Russian army but the cameraman says the video was actually shot in Tskhinvali, which had been flattened by Georgian shelling.

"When we arrived and news came that Gori was being shelled, I saw my footage. I said: that's not Gori! That's Tskhinvali. I can swear in front of any tribunal. I can point out this location on a map, because I and a cameraman from the channel Rossiya videotaped that," the channel quoted the cameraman as saying. Russian Report: CNN used Fake Video in Coverage of Georgia War

Anybody Else See This?

Fox News cuts American child for thanking Russian troops. A 12-year-old American girl visiting relatives during the conflict in South Ossetia has thanked Russian soldiers for saving her from the Georgian attack. However, America's Fox News attempted to cut her and her aunt off air.

Amanda Kokoeva was in a cafe in Tskhinvali when the firing from Georgian troops began.

She managed to get back to her uncle's basement where she spent the night. In a lull, she then managed to flee across the border to Russia, before boarding a plane bound for San Francisco.

"I want to say that I was running from Georgian troops bombing the city," she told America's Fox News Channel. "I want to say thank you to the Russian troops that were helping us out."

After that her aunt started saying that it was Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili who is to be blamed for the bloodshed, but the presenter tried to cut her off and go to a commercial break. Still, he finally let the woman finish the phrase at least.

Blowback from Bear-baiting

Paleoconservative blowhard, playing to the fringe, blows on tune for a change....,

American charges of Russian aggression ring hollow. Georgia started this fight – Russia finished it. People who start wars don't get to decide how and when they end.

Russia's response was "disproportionate" and "brutal," wailed Bush.

True. But did we not authorize Israel to bomb Lebanon for 35 days in response to a border skirmish where several Israeli soldiers were killed and two captured? Was that not many times more "disproportionate"?

Russia has invaded a sovereign country, railed Bush. But did not the United States bomb Serbia for 78 days and invade to force it to surrender a province, Kosovo, to which Serbia had a far greater historic claim than Georgia had to Abkhazia or South Ossetia, both of which prefer Moscow to Tbilisi?

Is not Western hypocrisy astonishing?

When old hands pulling a paycheck from MSNBC, Fox, and others calls a spade a spade, I think it's clear that the elite establishment Big Lie narrative cannot hold. Perhaps I'm mistaken, but this one has been leakier than an old rusty bucket.

Georgia: A Blow to U.S. Energy

Businessweek was reduced to blowing Russia too..., The Baku-Ceyhan was the Caspian's first western owned pipeline.

The sudden war in the Caucasus brought Georgia to heel, reasserted Russia's claim as the dominant force in the region, and dealt a blow to U.S. prestige. But in this part of the world, diplomacy and war are about oil and gas as much as they are about hegemony and the tragic loss of human life. Victory in Georgia now gives Russia the edge in the struggle over access to the Caspian's 35 billion barrels of oil and trillions of cubic feet of gas. The probable losers: the U.S. and those Western oil companies that have bet heavily on the Caspian as one of the few regions where they could still operate with relative freedom.

At the core of the struggle is a vast network of actual and planned pipelines for shipping Caspian Sea oil to the world market from countries that were once part of the Soviet empire. American policymakers working with a BP-led consortium had already helped build oil and natural gas pipelines across Georgia to the Turkish coast. Next on the drawing board: another pipeline through Georgia to carry natural gas from the eastern shore of the Caspian Sea to Austria—offering an alternate supply to Western Europe, which now depends on Russia for a third of its energy.

But after the mauling Georgia got, "any chance of a new non-Russian pipeline out of Central Asia and into Europe is pretty much dead," says Chris Ruppel, an energy analyst at Execution, a brokerage in Greenwich, Conn. The risk of building a pipeline through countries vulnerable to the wrath of Russia is just too high.

The plans of the U.S. and Western oil companies for expanded pipelines in the Caspian region may well be a casualty of Russia's attack.

The Georgia Crisis: A Blow to NATO

Blowing in Time

If Russia's brutal response to Georgia's provocation had, in fact, obliged NATO to intervene, the Atlantic Alliance itself might have faced a terminal crisis. Most of its member states have no enthusiasm for confronting a resurgent Russia in the Caucasus, traditionally a Russian sphere of influence. The Alliance, for one thing, is having enough trouble maintaining 71,000 troops in Afghanistan, where they are managing only to tread water against mounting odds. Other arguments against confrontation: much of Western Europe is wholly dependent on Russian energy supplies, and European negotiators believe there is little chance of a diplomatic solution to the Iran nuclear standoff without committed support from Moscow.

So, regardless of the appeals of Senator McCain — and his Democratic opponent, Senator Barack Obama — the events of the past week have more likely placed Georgia's NATO membership in the deep freeze for the foreseeable future, even if the Alliance remains rhetorically committed to the idea in principle. If so, Moscow can count what has transpired as a major victory: it has prevented the advance of a rival military alliance into Russia's backyard.

Since there was nothing else to be done about it, an awful lot of blowing took place in the MSM organs of TPTB this past week. Here's the first of three instances....,

Has Putin Walked into a Trap?

The immediate Russian response indicates that Putin/Medvedev had long anticipated what the Georgians would do under orders. It also suggests they have had time to carefully consider their immediate, short and long term responses. So, if as Mike Whitney contends, Putin has walked into a trap - he has done so with full measure of forethought.

"The Grand Chessboard" it is the 21st century's version of the Great Game. The book begins with this revealing statement:

"Ever since the continents started interacting politically, some five hundred years ago, Eurasia has been the center of world power.....The key to controlling Eurasia, says Brzezinski, is controlling the Central Asian Republics."

This is the heart-and-soul of the war on terror. The real braintrust behind "neverending conflict" was actually focussed on Central Asia. It was the pro-Israeli crowd in the Republican Party that pulled the old switcheroo and refocussed on the Middle East rather than Eurasia. Now, powerful members of the US foreign policy establishment (Brzezinski, Albright, Holbrooke) have regrouped behind the populist "cardboard" presidential candidate Barak Obama and are preparing to redirect America's war efforts to the Asian theater. Obama offers voters a choice of wars not a choice against war.

On Sunday, Brzezinski accused Russia of imperial ambitions comparing Putin to "Stalin and Hitler" in an interview with Nathan Gardels.

Gardels: What is the world to make of Russia's invasion of Georgia?

Zbigniew Brzezinski: Fundamentally at stake is what kind of role Russia will play in the new international system.(aka: New World Order) Unfortunately, Putin is putting Russia on a course that is ominously similar to Stalin's and Hitler's in the late 1930s. Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt has correctly drawn an analogy between Putin's "justification" for dismembering Georgia -- because of the Russians in South Ossetia -- to Hitler's tactics vis a vis Czechoslovakia to "free" the Sudeten Deutsch. Even more ominous is the analogy of what Putin is doing vis-a-vis Georgia to what Stalin did vis-a-vis Finland: subverting by use of force the sovereignty of a small democratic neighbor. In effect, morally and strategically, Georgia is the Finland of our day.

The current administration is scratching its head and stumbling and fumbling for a coherent response. Bubba McCain is rootin and tootin with a full chaw of wikipedia powering his foreign policy and national security pronouncements. Meanwhile, old Brookings hands like Holbrooke, Albright, and the chessmaster himself are coming up out of the woodwork, making the media rounds, sounding authoritative and clueful establishment pronouncements about the way things are - and the way things are a gonna be.....,

(oh yeah.., if you're wondering - those are pictures of Zbig with his boy Osama in 1981 training with the Pakistani army)

Why Georgia Does Not Belong in NATO

William Pfaff in the IHT; Nowhere in what I have read of the comment on this small but important war has it been explained [ital] why [unital] neither Georgia nor Ukraine should belong to NATO. They carry with them ready-made wars that NATO neither can nor should be expected to deal with. They are both ethnically and culturally divided nations whose histories are of struggle between or among their component parts.

In Georgia it is between the linguistically distinct enclaves that in the past were Russian and wish again to be Russian, and the majority of Georgians who want to be part of the West, but are also determined to dominate their rebellious territories.

If they would peacefully renounce those territories, an ethnically and culturally united Georgia would have every right to demand NATO membership. But as things are now (or were, until the last few days), Mikheil Saakashvili wants his country inside NATO to protect him from the consequences of forcing those dissident territories to remain under Georgian domination. NATO has no business doing such a thing, and as Russia supports the rebel enclaves, NATO membership for Georgia has war with Russia built into it. As we have just seen.

In Ukraine, the problem is between a culturally and historically Orthodox and Russian-speaking Ukraine, and a westernized and Uniate Catholic Ukraine, whose ties are to Poland and Lithuania. Westernized Ukraine is trying to use NATO to help it dominate Russian Ukraine. This again has war built into it, and NATO must stay away from a conflict that is an unresolved and possibly irresolvable internal Ukrainian problem.

NATO is extremely lucky that Germany and France blocked it earlier this year from offering membership to Georgia. Had they not done so, NATO today would either have threatened Russia with war this week, or its Article Five guarantee to come to the military aid of any of its members under attack would have been discredited.

Washington Risked Nuclear War by Miscalculation

As always, Engdahl provided worthy analysis and commentary;

The dramatic military attack by the military of the Republic of Georgia on South Ossetia in the last days has brought the world one major step closer to the ultimate horror of the Cold War era—a thermonuclear war between Russia and the United States—by miscalculation. What is playing out in the Caucasus is being reported in US media in an alarmingly misleading light, making Moscow appear the lone aggressor. The question is whether George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are encouraging the unstable Georgian President, Mikhail Saakashvili in order to force the next US President to back the NATO military agenda of the Bush Doctrine. This time Washington may have badly misjudged the possibilities, as it did in Iraq, but this time with possible nuclear consequences.

The underlying issue, as I stressed in my July 12 Global Research article entitled Georgia, Washington and Moscow: a Nuclear Geopolitical Poker Game , is the fact that since the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact in 1991 one after another former member as well as former states of the USSR have been coaxed and in many cases bribed with false promises by Washington into joining the counter organization, NATO.

Rather than initiate discussions after the 1991 dissolution of the Warsaw Pact about a systematic dissolution of NATO, Washington has systematically converted NATO into what can only be called the military vehicle of an American global imperial rule, linked by a network of military bases from Kosovo to Poland to Turkey to Iraq and Afghanistan. In 1999, former Warsaw Pact members Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic joined NATO. Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, and Slovakia followed suit in March 2004. Now Washington is putting immense pressure on the EU members of NATO, especially Germany and France, that they vote in December to admit Georgia and Ukraine.

Which brings me full-circle to what I believe the primary takeaway should be for all us armchair observers and pundits of affairs on the world stage. The battle for political hearts and minds between competing narrative and counternarrative is where a WHOLE LOT of this proxy war is currently being fought across all media channels. I wonder for how much longer a robust and unfettered narrative information exchange will be allowed to proceed - particularly as the strength and depth of narratives contrary to the aims of TPTB continue to proliferate?

So?

U.S. says Moscow's membership in global clubs at stake - and how exactly is that unlike being denied entre into an *elite* trailer park?

Russia's integration into international institutions like the World Trade Organization is at risk because of Moscow's military operations in Georgia, a senior U.S. official said on Tuesday.

The United States may also cancel a naval exercise with Russia to indicate its disapproval of Moscow's attacks on its neighbor, American officials said.

"Russia has a lot to lose" if it ignores international pressure to stop its attacks on Georgia, withdraw its forces from the former Soviet republic and enter into serious negotiations on the future of Georgia's breakaway areas, the senior U.S. official said.

One of the things that's always tickled me driving along the interstate highways - is the number of "manors", "estates", and "country clubs" you happen upon in the titles of some of the most brokedown and decrepit looking trailer parks imaginable.

Now that Russia has the largest proven energy reserves, a massive nuclear arsenal, and huge conventional military, trade surpluses with the rest of the world, etc, etc, etc..., what exactly is it that the old boys club has to offer Russia that might deter it from further consolidation of its interests?

impotent weakness update U.S. limited in Georgia crisis;Expulsion of Russia from the G-8 group of industrialized nations was among the few apparent strong actions the US and Europe could take.

Other possible moves include threatening Russia with the loss of the 2014 Winter Olympic games at the Black Sea resort of Sochi.

"The United States, its allies, and other countries need to send a strong signal to Moscow that creating 19th-century-style spheres of influence and redrawing the borders of the former Soviet Union is a danger to world peace," said Ariel Cohen, senior research fellow in Russian and Eurasian studies at the Heritage Foundation, in an analysis of the impact of the crisis.

McCain - Wikipedia Foreign Policy Badass...,

Did McCain Plagiarize His Speech on the Georgia Crisis? which means by extension that all subrealism readers and commentors are absolute foreign policy and national security GAWDS!!!! (good to know and we should all burnish our resumes accordingly) Submariner - you should straight up represent as a senior statesman.



Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Susan Rice told the truth about the wikipedia badass's big talk over the weekend; "John McCain shot from the hip, [with a] very aggressive, very belligerent statement," she said. "He may or may not have complicated the situation."

McCain's first statement was dramatically different from the White House's, Obama's, and the Western Europeans, all of whom were urging calm, and all of whom shifted to condemning Russia only after it emerged that the calmate rhetoric was futile.

Scratch Russia Georgia War and You Find Oil and Gas Pipelines

The war between Russia and Georgia has some nationalist elements, some old grudges but mostly it rubs the wrong way Russia’s newly found power: energy imperialism.

Georgia has refused to play along like other former Soviet states and, if anything, its independent attitude has been a giant irritant for Russia ever since Vladimir Putin used oil and gas to project hegemony over the region and, by extension, into all Europe. At the same time, Georgia, a tiny, 4 million people country has been trying to ward off the giant on its north by seeking membership in NATO or the European Union. In the postCold War era, the United States and Russiadependent Europe are reduced to just pleading for calm.

A look at the map makes the issue at hand quite transparent.

Oil and gas can come from Russia into Europe by tanker through the Black Sea from its massive terminal in Novorossiysk or by pipelines through Belarus, Ukraine and even plans of under water construction in the Baltic. All of these give Russia a huge leverage, almost monopoly, over both the transit and destination countries. More than 25 European countries depend now for more than 75% of their oil and gas from Russia.

But Georgia was eager to act as a spoiler and European countries were even more eager to comply while trying to avoid incurring the wrath of the hand that feeds them. More fair and balanced coverage of talking monkey resource war at Energytribune.

U.S. refuses Israel weapons to attack Iran:

According to Reuters this morning the United States has turned down Israeli requests for military hardware to help it prepare for a possible attack on Iranian nuclear facilities, a frontpage report in Israel's Haaretz newspaper said on Wednesday.

The unsourced report said the Americans had warned Israel against carrying out any such attack and had refused to supply offensive military hardware. Instead they had offered to improve the Jewish state's defenses against surface-to-surface missiles.

Interviewed on Israeli Army Radio, Defense Minister Ehud Barak did not deny the Haaretz story, but refused to discuss it. "It would not be right to talk about these things," Barak said. You would think that after the Georgian misadventure, and given the fact that there are hundreds if not thousands of Russian technicals working with the Iranians on their nuclear program, that the lesson given over the past five days would have been more astutely taken by all those for whom it was intended. Attacking Iran will be the functional equivalent of attacking Russia and very possibly China, as well. There is no more room for unilateral cowboy antics - or as my man Nanakwame put it, "it's very interesting watching the welding of the circumference of the world".

Orlov Breaks Down the Georgia Situation

Thanks to my man RC - we now have the deep backstory behind this weekend's altercation courtesy none other than sage collapse commentator Dmitry Orlov.

You've got to go read the whole thing for yourself, however, the essential breakdown is quoted below for easy assimilation.

It may be difficult for some people to grasp why it is that the Abkhaz or the Ossetians do not much fancy suddenly becoming Georgian, so let me offer you a precise analogy. Suppose Los Angeles, California, were to collapse as the USSR once did, and East L.A. quickly moved to declare its independence. Suppose, further, that the 88% of its population that is Hispanic/Latino voted that the other 12% were free to stay on as "guests," provided they only spoke Spanish. The teaching of English were to be forbidden. After some bloody skirmishes, East L.A. split up into ethnic enclaves. Then some foreign government (say, Russian, or Chinese) stepped in and started shipping in weapons and providing training to the Latino faction, in support of their efforts to restore East L.A.'s "territorial integrity." As a non-Hispanic resident of East L.A., would you then (1) run and hide, (2) stay and fight, or (3) pick up a copy of "Spanish for Dummies" and start cramming?

The Abkhaz and the South Ossetians have made their preference very clear by applying for and being issued with a Russian passport. That's right, the majority of the present native population of these two "separatist enclaves" are bona fide citizens of the Russian Federation with all the privileges appertaining thereto. Lacking any other options, they are happy to accept protection from Russia, use Russian as their lingua franca, and fight for their right to be rid of Georgians once and for all. One of the privileges of being a Russian citizen at this stage, when Russia has recovered from its political and economic woes following the Soviet collapse, is that if some foreign entity comes and shells a settlement full of Russian citizens, you can be sure that Russia will open one amazingly huge can of whoop-ass on whoever it feels is responsible. Add to that the atrocities allegedly perpetrated by the Georgian forces, such as finishing off wounded Russian peacekeepers, and you can see why the normally shy and reticent Russian army might get behind the idea of making sure Georgia no longer poses a military threat to anyone. The Georgians have really done it to themselves this time, and we should all feel very sorry for them. They are not evil people, just incredibly misguided by their horrible national politicians. The West, and the US in particular, bear responsibility for enabling this bloodbath by providing them with arms, training, and encouraging them to fight for their "territorial integrity."

Now that you've seen the composition of that Georgian national flag, you'll understand fully why the base is whipped into an unthinking frenzy in support of Georgia (GOOD) and Russia (EVIL) in the politico-moral shorthand that passes for rational thought in fin d'siecle America....,