Friedman and Kennan? ‘Fraid So
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Harris & Ewing The Fall of Washington: Smokestacks on the Mall Sep 17 1935 And now for something completely different. Occasionally, I go through anal
[See the full post at: Friedman and Kennan? ‘Fraid So]Re Elliott and Argentina – so Argentina is saying that Elliott took out insurance (which Elliott has denied). What a Wall Street kind of way to loot – buy up the bonds for next to nothing, then push for full payment, knowing full well that Argentina will fold.
“The dual roles can skew incentives because creditors will sometimes stand to profit more from a swaps payout than an issuer actually meeting its debt obligations.”
Elliott is saying they didn’t have insurance? Yeah, right! If they didn’t, perhaps the other parties around the ISDA table did. Am I understanding this incorrectly? And Argentina is going to ask the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to look into it? Who do they think runs that? The same people.
Re antibiotic-resistant bacteria – this is scary stuff, worse than MRSA and C-diff. Too many people taking antibiotics as if they were candy. Had a friend who took her kids to the doctor every time they sneezed and demanded they be given antibiotics. We are keeping AIDS patients, and others with compromised immune systems, alive with massive amounts of antibiotics. This will be our undoing unless we develop new weapons to fight bacteria.
“Another major risk factor is being in a country with unregulated antibiotic distribution. In countries where antibiotics are over-the counter and obtainable without a prescription, studies found that the incidence and prevalence of CRE infections were higher . One study from Japan found that 6.4% of healthy adults carried extended-spectrum beta lactamase (mostly cefotaximase)-producing strains compared to 58.4% in Thailand, where antibiotics are available over the counter and without prescription. Likewise, an Egyptian research group found that 63.3% of healthy adults were colonized.”
Also in the food industry:
“The food industry has been identified as a potential source of antibiotic-resistant Enterobacteriaceae. Increased antibiotic use in livestock feed has increased the number of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbapenem_resistant_enterobacteriaceae
Growth, growth, growth. More people, more animals, more crowding – a bacteria’s dream.
Raleigh,
The really big area for improvement here is outlawing antibiotics in animal feed. The vast use of antibiotics in factory farming is part of a really horrific scenario, anyway.
It was discovered in the 1940s and fully verified in the 1950s, that antibiotics in feed increase weight gain for the same calories in. It was proven repeatedly to work for humans, too.
Individuals can help themselves by keeping their gut flora “microbiome” healthy and diverse, being active, eating fresh plants, and maybe taking 2000-5000 IU of vitamin-D daily, especially in winter, or if they never get much sun.
We should all think more of supporting life, than trying to battle death.
That’s my professional opinion. It’s free.“I find it hard to believe nobody else has jumped on the ‘heart’ of that article: the Ukraine parliament voting down the sale of Naftogaz to western interests; if that’s not big enough for you, what is?”
This is ironic, the maidan protest and riots which allowed the staging of the february coup were supposedly all about Yanukovych’ refusal to sign the EU association treaty.
This association treaty, shrouded in secrecy, contains corruptive clauses which force Ukraine to trade into the EU markets against its own interests, and at the expense of excluding free trade with Russia specifically.
The association treaty obviously does the opposite of facilitating free and fair trade for Ukraine, otherwise its contents would not have been secretly negotiated and its signing coerced by violence and extortion.The assumption is that Yanukovych, apart from being politically pressured by Moscow not to sign, was personally compelled to not betray his country’s economic interests, because the treaty was too clearly unprofitable for Ukraine.
The Maidan protestors never had the opportunity to read the treaty, but Yanukovych, having read it, may have found it impossible to swallow and therefore decided not to sign. Its rumored that certain secret clauses would have placed the Ukrainian military directly under NATO command. If so, it may have been illegal for Yanukovych to sign the association treaty. It would have been beyond his authority as president to have Ukraines military sovereignty subsumed by NATO in this way.Then, after the Rada commited to state treason by grossly exeeding their authority in impeaching Yanukovych, they signed the EU association treaty anyway, which, depending on its content, may itself yield a seperate act of treason on their part.
Now the Ukrainian Rada, being confronted with the coercive realities of western trade negotiations, has itself apparently reached the same conclusion as Yanukovych did, concerning the obvious extortionary asset-stripping conditions which western aid and IMF loans are attached to, being diametrically opposed to Ukraines long-term economic interests.
With the coup government resigning, it has become apparent that Ukraines (un)elected bodies no longer excercise control over the nations military and its unwarranted campaign of butchery in the east. The IMF loan clauses do unlawfully compel the Ukrainian government to safeguard the country’s territorial integrity, presumably to protect oil company interests in the separatist regions, whereas the bitterly contested association treaty may itself have unlawfully placed the Ukrainian military under NATO command directly. If this is true, and insofar as the Rada, at the time being already commited to state treason, was totally unauthorised to sign the association treaty, then NATO’s entire presence in Ukraine may be designated as a hostile occupying force and a legitimate military target by the separatist forces, or indeed, by anyone who has a civil or professional duty to uphold the constitution, especially against state treason.
After resigning, puppet PM Yatsenyuk stated that the Rada needed a reset. He is right, for the wrong reasons. He also stated that the Rada now refuses to provide funds for continuing the war on the separatist regions, but this refusal to provide funds would make the Rada less guilty of complicity in the genocidal warcrimes being committed in the separatist regions, although they’re already lethally complicit for their part.
Normally, the parliament, being the most broadly elected representative body, has the sovereign authority to allocate or deny funds for war, but the Rada needs a reset anyway as a supermajority of them did undeniably commit state treason on feb 22.
The territorial integrity of the Ukrainian nation only exists conceptually within the Ukrainian constitution, which is no longer operative in any meaningful sense.
No one in Kiev takes their constitution seriously anymore, if they’ve ever read it, they must have overlooked article 111. The concepts of sovereignty and self-determination lose all meaning outside of democratic discourse, especially under an authoritarian dictatorship now operating in Kiev.
However, the territorial integrity of the people of the Ukraine is an immediate reality, wherein the sovereign right and duty of the separatist population is vested, to resist the coup government and its armed incursions into the separatist territories.
So long as the separatists remain in their own regions and, by means of armed resistance, only target invading military forces, they have every right to resist the illegitimate coup regime, and have more right to resist Kiev than Kiev has a right to assault them.
Its an unfortunate conclusion that every officer and agent of government sworn to uphold the Ukrainian constitution has the explicit duty to attempt to place the entire Rada and the resigned government officials under immediate arrest for treason, for state crimes agains democracy and for warcrimes, insofar as such crimes have clearly been committed on the basis of overwhelming public evidence.
If it is indeed NATO itself which has consolidated the Kiev coup by military means, under the Rada’s double treason, and if it is NATO itself which now commands Kiev’s forces in their assault on the east, then it is therefore necessary to designate NATO’s command and control as a hostile occupying force in Ukraine, at least from a resistance/separatist point of view.
Does everyone see the problem here?
Who is commanding Kiev’s army now that the government has resigned?
Does anyone in the self-deposed national government have residual authority to give military commands which serve the coup regime, even if they are not elsewise complicit in the least degree in the coup?If the NATO treaty organisation is to survive as a sensible defensive alliance which may serve european security, I would recommend expelling the US from its membership and admitting Russia into NATO. It is primarily because of the US’ sickness that NATO acts in this way, aggresively expansionist, Russia might serve european interests better as military ally once the US empire fully collapses. Pro-democratic european values are now actually more closely alligned to russian values than to US non-values, the US having thoroughly destroyed any semblance of democratic intent in their foreign agenda, being seen throughout the world as bigger cheats and liars than modern Russia, and russian leadership is evidently less psychotic than US leadership. I do believe that the US leadership is insane to the extent that european NATO members now have a greater chance of being nuked by the US itself than by Russia.
@ gravity,
NATO can no more afford to expel it’s Sugar Daddy, than can the UN. But, of course, both exist to serve their masters.
RE:The links were from a site that I think is Ukrainian, though I don’t know which ‘side’ in Ukraine, since I can’t read either the Cyrillic or the Roman contents.
It’s becoming vital to understand which side because the situation has quickly dissolved into the stoking of old ethnic divisions which is now open hatred. Dimiry Orlov has been sinking into spasms of anti Ukrainian prejudice. The entire situation there now fully polarized along ethic lines. I am sure by now you have seen the internet TV station journalist saying 1.5 million in the Donbass region are superfluous and need to be eliminated. I won’t link.
The Pandora’s Box has been opened.
@ rapier
” … I am sure by now you have seen the internet TV station journalist saying 1.5 million in the Donbass region are superfluous and need to be eliminated. I won’t link.”There’s not enough resources to accomplish such a task. There would be even less resources after. The toll would be double and from both side.
It ain’t going to happen. ( my banker said so )
My take on Ukraine, in a nutshell, is all the various power structures within it are East/West props. One must look to Washington DC and Moscow to understand who is pulling the strings of the actors there.
Will the K St lobbyists outlast the Russian oligarchy? Or, most likely, when costs close in on potential return, will a deal be agreed upon where both entities profit at the expense of all others? Like in present day Afghanistan?
For sure, as assorted pipelines are completed around it, Ukraine’s importance will diminish somewhat, and some new battleground will be found to keep the wheels of MIC commerce spinning within the Super Powers.
That’s the Macro, IMO. Delving into the Micro only subjects one to the influence of propaganda at this point.
As an aside, back in my military days I found myself in the presence of an Infantry Strategist over beers one evening. Several of us were arguing the justice/injustice, as well as other reasons, for undeclared brush fire wars.
At the end of the discussion, this officer chimed in with (paraphrase, been a long time)
‘ These offensive interventions begin for two reasons. Political gain, and as perpetual live fire training programs in order to maintain a state of military readiness.’Logic and Justice have nothing to do with it.
The point is the rhetoric and the stoking of emotions and nationalism. The whole thing is a process we have seen played out in Rowanda and Yugoslavia where politicians and politics stoke ethnic division for all sorts of bad reasons.
I was clueless about the ethnic makeup and divide of Ukraine until this all started and only just now am coming to grips with what it means. What it means is death and destruction. Already any settlement along a Ukrainian Federation seem impossible.
Did our Great Global Strategic Thinkers, Victoria ‘fuck the EU’ Nuland, anticipate this? Who knows. Did Obama? Probably not but the Pandora’s Box of war has opened as it did in Syria and blood is on his hands to the extent we encouraged instead of discouraging violence for the purpose or regime change.
These narcissists are beyond grasping the human toll of their actions. They think of Ukraine as a chess board. Nothing more.
To add, divide and conquer is becoming mainstream here in the FSA as well. To wit, immigration now equates to race. How convenient on the part of our leadership.
Unfortunately, scorched earth is where this all ends. Not much any of us can do, but take a side and accelerate the process, or stand back and try not to get any on us.
Say, anyone notice ASPO seems pretty invested in the MH-17 party line? i.e. …”Moscow’s continuing efforts to destabilize Ukraine and its lack of candor about its involvement in the shoot down of the Malaysian airliner.”…”To counter this assault Moscow has undertaken a major buildup in military equipment along its border with Ukraine”…
I find this rather interesting for an outfit peddling critical thinking with regards to peak oil…
Desert
[“His status among American elites is the single most potent fact for understanding the nation’s imperial decline.”]
Whenever I heard this guy speak in interviews, I a l w a y s asked myself: w the bloody f is this guy saying that justifies his “position” ? Is it even possible to be less insightful ?
–and always, ALWAYS– four words proceeded to float in my mind few seconds later.
“This guy’s a hack” …followed by the occasional variant “This guy’s a mediocre hack”So you’re little quote here, I find absolutely exquisite; in addition to providing me with a good –much needed laugh, it made me incapable of resisting the urge to register, just to communicate my ecstatic pleasure of not being alone. I guess calling BS on this kind of guy is like popping a big cyst; you just know it has to be done — and then ….god what a relief …!
Thanks for the relief Ilargi !
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