[current brinkmanship] we're not ready yet, says europe

The Asia Times says:

European NATO members are increasingly nervous about the prospect of a military confrontation with Russia. Last August's swift Russian response to act in aid of South Ossetians against the Georgian invasion sent a reality shock through Europe.

Neither Germany nor France wish to admit unstable states like Georgia or Ukraine only to be forced to act militarily in their defense in event of a repeat of the madness of last August.

Much is made of the rusting Russian navy and the depleted army but Russia's strength has always been in numbers, as with China. Not just in numbers either but in a fanaticism which would be lacking in the "away" players. For what strategic purpose would Europe wish to anatagonize the north-east border state over rogue leaders in Georgia and the Ukraine? You can throw Belarussia into that too.

And don't forget a mobile China who have the super-highway to reach the sub-continent plus a friendly neighbour to the north.

As for Europe, the EU state still has a few teething problems e.g. Ireland and the Milliband/Merkel army won't be ready for at least half a decade, except as a sabre-rattling exercise. Of course, a split in NATO would give the EU the green light to proceed full tilt with this.

So what is America's game here? In their brinkmanship with Russia, aren't they forgetting Europe's own grand design?

As far as we're concerned, we're still only entering the great depression and history dictates that it always takes a few years for the seeds of discord and the demoralization of the people to be achieved. At the moment, too many are still hopeful for an upturn of the economy and not everyone is yet sucking on the subsistence teat of the nanny state.

2009 might even see the best laid plans of the inner circle overturned and the whole show postponed for yet another generation. Humans can be so unpredictable at times.

[screenplay] man and the ascended beings

Just finished watching Stargate, the Ark of Truth and the mythology made me start thinking just how much more bizarre the reality of what did occur in the beginning might have been.

Here's a sci-fi plot off the top of the head.

Imagine that there are two types of ascended beings. The first lot created Man and just as a parent loves his child, wants to see him grow, learn, develop, evolve, not by being directed in every action like a robot but by imparting a code to live by, a sort of self-regulatory mechanism, so Man himself was given a lot of rope, only to be tapped back on course a few times. Freedom within limits and oodles of love.

The other type of ascended being recognizes the danger lurking inside Man, the potential power of combined good. You see it everywhere - things being built, communities, families and so on. Get enough humans combining and the collective power is awesome, as long as it is in free association. The downside of this is that humans who are used to this sort of freedom are not particularly amenable to command and control schemes.

Recognizing that humans are susceptible though to the "balance of opposing forces" idea, the Dark Ascended devise a nifty logo and suggest the first teaching - that for every white action, you need to do a black one to "spiritually balance it".

Thus the principle of evil is implanted.

The second teaching is that the things taught to you by the white side, authority figures and your parents are restrictive, anachronistic and boring - that there is really only one rule in life: "Do as thou will." So all human activity is taken to excess and called good. However, as Anakin Skywalker and many others across the galaxy found to their cost and that of billions of others, unrestrained action actually weakens a person's character and makes him more susceptible to the Dark Ascended.

The DAs also recognize that if they can get enough humans worshipping them, there is immense power in that, allowing them to fulfil their real goal of enslaving and slaughtering Earth's population, the original threat. The only way to get Man to knuckle under is to first create a utopian ideal he'll cling to - the fair redistribution of wealth to all humans who will now live in an ascendant paradise, with no war, no misery and no suffering. Call it, for want of a better term, the Illumined Way.

The Dark Ascended now point to the disaster that unbridled greed, hedonism and lack of self-control have led to and say the only way to get Man back on course to the Utopian nirvana, where all men are brothers and share equally in the collective wealth, is for each person to voluntarily sign away his freedoms and give a pledge of loyalty to the brave new world.

Having got most humans on the planet to sign freely, having coerced almost all the rest, there are just a few rebels left who support the white side and the Old Ways - they're hunted down across the galaxy as insurgents and terrorists and that's where the film ends.

Not a bad plot, d'you think?

[word verification] is it the water or something

What's going on today? Already we have these two gems:

PANTIES

PSYSLUTS

Is it just me?

[britain near bankrupt] and the joy of the soviet union

Seeing as, this Monday morning, we're all into the hat tipping business, let me hat tip the Shrewd Mammal for presenting this:

So now, we implement the “Zimbabwe protocol”.

Hat tip to Guido & the UKLP blog

Aside from bailing out the banks with our money, it appears the government is about to run out of it so what do they do?

• repeal an act that has been in place for over 164 years
• release the Bank of England from it’s reporting obligations
• print more money

Predicted here, reported here, and detailed (??!!) here.

He covers the issue well and it needs no further comment from me, so let me move tangentially and tell you some stories from Russia about the Soviet days.

The people whose stories you'd give the most credence to were the grandparents, many of whom still hankered after the dead weight of the nanny state, on the grounds that everything was nominally free and one didn't have to think for oneself, which left one in a state of infantilization, whilst not delivering on the whole raison d'etre of that state in the first place.

The Eggs

Anyway, I was having lunch at one set of grandparents and the gf was telling me that they used to travel to Moscow overnight on the train to buy food and other goods, including eggs.

"And do you know, James," added the grandmother, "where they were produced in the first place?"

"No."

"Here. Right here." Both of them laughed at the incompetence of the creaky old "welfare' state.

The Denunciation

They wouldn't have dared laugh during Soviet times, as the story of Misha testifies. Misha told a tale of when he was in school. He apparently asked a question about the efficiency of state shops and one or two other choice topics, for which he was put in a spare room, until a local official arrived to "correct" his error.

Misha told me he was held there for four hours and still had to do the homework afterwards, on the lessons he'd missed. His mother did not fare as well.

There was a principle, in Soviet times, of Denunciation and all citizens were exhorted to turn in or officially denounce wrong thinking neighbours, especially teachers. Apparently this lady transgressed, was denounced by the mother of a pupil whom she'd offended and the whole time-wasting paraphernalia of due process got under way.

I understand the whole matter was shelved eventually and the documents were all stamped and filed. As long as the documents are filed, that was everything.

The general goods shop

Even when I arrived in Russia, some years after the Soviet times, things hadn't greatly altered in the state shops but a new type of entrepeneur was starting to open western style chains which were still a bit expensive, comparatively.

This was how it worked. You needed a new lock for your door, say. You took the bus, then tram, to the line of state shops and inside, the numbers of people were surprising in such a suburban corner of the city. The counters ran round three walls of the long, rectangular shop and behind them were maybe five different points, manned by two or three women with little hats, tunics and forbidding grimaces.

A lot has been made of this stereotype and to be fair, would you be smiling if you'd had to put up with customer scowls all day, every day, for little actual pay? So, to get this lock, you had to be savvy and know which queue. I got into the wrong queue and when I eventually made it to the top, was told, summarily, that those locks were "over there", with a wave of the hand.

Well, couldn't you possibly ...? Already she'd turned to the next customer behind me. There was nothing for it but to line up in the other queue. Very quickly, in post-Soviet days, you learnt the expresssion, "Kto poslyedni?" meaning, "Who's last in the line?" Then came the wait yet again.

At the top of the queue [and I've shortened this process for reader consumption], the woman stabbed a finger at the one example of the lock in the locked glass case but it wasn't the one I needed. She shrugged. I realized I had to take this one and as I was near the end of the process, I said, "Da."

She went over to the table behind her and started to fill out a chit, cme back and gave it to me.

"Where do I go?"

She waved in the general direction of the other end of the room and a kind old chap pointed me to the citadel, the glassed in holder of the moneys, the cashier, obscured behind a queue which stretched back to the entrance to the shop. Of course, mathematically, customers from five different points, descending on the one cashier, was always going to create a mega-queue.

It wasn't anyone's job to notice this, let alone comment on it. To report this inefficiency was more than your flat was worth.

So, some hour and twenty minutes after entering the store and with a perverse determination to complete this cursed exercise, I got to the cashier, paid, had the chit torn at one corner and joined the "collect" queue to get the lock.

Eventually I made it to the top again, she took the chit and scrutinized it, then went out the back. I could hear her rummaging round. She came back, if not apologetically, at least with less assertiveness and here was the one redeeming feature of the business. She had no right to have the item on display if it wasn't in stock. Rules are rules. She knew it might be sheeted home to her and as I'd been reasonable and was foreign, she let me have the other lock which was available and was at the same price.

Conclusions

What we had here was a centrally imposed, inflexible system, which a cowed and compliant population had long ago decided wasn't worth the consequences in opposing and instead, an air of resignation pervaded. Nothing was done to reform the system because that would have involved reporting one's misgivings to one's hierarchical superiors and those superiors could see that to their advantage.

People said nothing and kept their own counsel until one chink in the armour appeared in Gorbachev and then the floodgates opened.

Similarly, Brown is running out of money and even the IMF reportedly [don't quote me on this] warned him there was a cap to his assertions to the British people. No one can change the system because everyone is too frightened for his own job, with Christmas coming.

At this stage, people like bloggers and the MSM are still speaking out but look at the American situation where no one is commenting in the MSM on Obama's ineligibility. The expression "knowing which side the bread's buttered on" springs to mind.

Britain is not yet Soviet Russia but we are already at a stage where the sins of the Beloved Leader are officially forgiven and all sorts of excesses and inefficiencies of the centrally organized and mushrooming bureaucracy are lightly passed over, once the MSM and blogosphere have had their say. We're also seeing the beginnings of people being encouraged to grass on neighbours who fail to comply with legislation on, say, wheelie bins.

As in Soviet Russia, the system is bankrupt underneath the facade but unlike Soviet Russia, we are not moving to drop the discredited socialist system but are actually hell-bent on creating a new one.

It's just a question of time, tovarischii.

[pc carol 4] for the winter solstice season

Mythical deity-like Figure Rest you Merry Gentlemen and Ladies, Boys, Girls and Small Furry Animals, not excluding other Creatures of all Shapes and Sizes, Capitalized and non-capitalized; also not exclusively Mammalian and in no particular order

Now to the asserted yet unsubstantiated authority figure in an alleged and unproven region of the cosmos, sing praises,

All you within these non-denominational, all-inclusive, supportive and non-discriminatory places,

And with true love and brotherhood and sisterhood, irrespective of sexual orientation or colour, celebrating the joy of multiculturalism,

Each other now embrace in an entirely platonic and non sexually harassing way, devoid of sexism, ageism, disabilitism or any other -ism;

This holy [in the sense of it being of personal spiritual delusion only] tide of the holiday around the 25th of December - the one we've now defaced:

O tidings of comfort and joy,

Comfort and joy,

O tidings of comfort and joy

Under no circumstances are the following lyrics to be sung, failure to observe this stipulation possibly resulting in prosecution, seizure and confiscation of any or all winter holiday gifts you may erroneously have pre-purchased:

Now to the Lord sing praises,
All you within this place,
And with true love and brotherhood
Each other now embrace;
This holy tide of Christmas
All other doth deface.
O tidings of comfort and joy,
Comfort and joy
O tidings of comfort and joy

[beauty] can be found even in the dystopic

There's speculation as to the origin of Blake's Dark Satanic Mills but methinks you need go no further than the road north from Guisborough, just before skirting Middlesborough on the elevated A19.

If you look down on the valley from that high point, there are your dark satanic mills or at least multiple smokestacks belching into the atmosphere and it's one of the most poignant images I think I ever beheld. Perhaps the high hillside elevation burned it into the memory all the more and maybe it was because I always seemed to get there just before dusk on a dull and gloomy day.

Bradford

They seem to have cleaned up their act a bit now but the contrast between the exquisitely beautiful Britain and the dire, satanic is still stark as you travel up and down the country. Makes a person think how a people could ever let it get that way and yet the people didn't, did they? They were in thrall then, as they are now.

The way Britain is arranged, the contrasts within such short distances, the hills and the complexity of winding roads, the architectural styles, the sense of history and the ancient walls, these are complemented by the unique sense of dress which I quite like, especially in the north.



Most people here prefer beautiful places such as the stately home above and the majority of pics on blogs show the beautiful vignette or vista. However, there can be a terrible beauty in dystopic visions as well and if you want a contrast like that, you can do worse than go to the land of contrasts - Russia.

Whichever way you slice it, Russia is a harsh land and the picture below illustrates this. If you're caught out here, there are no beg pardons and you do die if you're silly enough not to be adequately rugged up, especially on the head and feet. Vodka does help cut the chill, as well as a companion but ultimately, you're on your own, with no support services.



Below is a fairly typical street scene in the back streets although the high street now has its shiny facades and boutique window shopping. If you want to get an idea of the contrast between beauty and dystopia, imagine chic women, dressed to the nines, picking there way gingerly along these tracks on their way home from work to their housing block.

In Russia, there is the raw beauty of nature, the vodka [or cognac] and the women and you can't avoid any of them. I don't particularly like vodka [preferring whisky] but if you're invited to your girlfriend's parents or grandparents, then you must have your snort of vodka when the grandfather brings out the two glasses and the bottle.



He's no alcoholic but it's the law of hospitality to splash your glass and his - it's a sign of acceptance and to refuse doesn't bear thinking about - it wouldn't compute in his brain. So I usually stuck to a three glass limit, as my mind was on the other part of the equation - my girlfriend.

Men and women live by extremes. If you are industrious, then you're a workaholic. If you're fond of the vodka, you can be an alcoholic but as so much is consumed, there's no hard and fast definition of this. Women demand their men to be men and the men expect the women to look fabulous, which they do. Everything is done hard - partying, shopping, sex, board games - it's all done at maximum velocity.

If you look at this pic above, you'll maybe notice the jar of pickled coleslaw. For a picnic in the forest, there'll be some sort of meat - often thick slices of whole fish pre-fried and tin-foiled up, there must be a salad or two and potato in some form, plus the drinks. someone will have brought the tea in a flask and there'll be plastic bags of sweets and some fruit.

Look at the stark scene behind as well. I think this is what distinguishes much of western Europe from Russia. In Europe, it is chic within a chic setting. In Russia, it is always beauty against this starkness and with the dystopic not so far away. It's intense and different.