After a frosty reception at the G20 summit in Australia this week, Russian President Vladimir Putin required some much needed rest, at least according to the official explanation given for his conspicuously early departure from the proceedings. All things considered it could have been a lot worse. Russia finds itself in familiar territory after a controversial half-year, highlighted by the bloody and still unresolved situation in Ukraine. Nonetheless, the prospect of further sanctions looms low and Russia's stores of oil and gas remain high.
Shortsighted? Maybe, but Russia has proven before – the 2008 financial crisis for example– that it can ride its resource rents through a prolonged economic slump. Higher oil price volatility and sanctions separate the current downturn from that of 2008, but Russia's economic fundamentals remain the same – bolstered by low government debt and a large amount of foreign reserves. Moreover, Western involvement in Russian oil and gas plays is more pronounced than ever.
Economic diversification has not come easy for Russia, arguably for a simple, but effective reason; oil and gas are a source of tremendous wealth for the country. However, the dire straits of the 2008 global crisis illustrated the importance of financial diversification. Since then, Russian state-owned oil and gas giants Rosneft and Gazprom have increasingly allowed Western majors like BP, Eni, Exxon, Shell, Statoil, and Total access to some of Russia's underdeveloped, but prized projects. Western companies have an estimated $35 billion tied up in Russian oil with hundreds of billions more planned and service providers Halliburton and Schlumberger each derive approximately five percent of their global sales from the Russian market. More at the link in the title.
#3
This isn't a permanent situation anyway. The Russian position appears to be, to stall till spring, while simultaneously dangling carrots, spreading bribes, and looking for openings. Tactically, they're not currently in a position to lose; The question is, how big is the win?
Posted by: ed in texas ||
11/21/2014 7:43 Comments ||
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#4
Of course they can ride it out. Question is for how long?
#6
The Russian people are inured to s#!t sandwiches. Russia can survive an oil price war in the sense that a cockroach can survive a nuclear blast. They'll still be cockroaches.
#7
East and Orient, or West and Occident. The issue was finally decided in favor of the former when in the 19th Century the Russian Slavophiles and the oriental despots dominated the emerging liberal Russian Westernizers. Lost was the chance for Russia to be included among the European nations.
For a short time following the fall of the Communists Russia had a chance to join the Western community of nations. And true to custom, it has failed to do so.
#8
"Lost was the chance for Russia to be included among the European nations."
You say that like it was a bad thing.
Posted by: Mullah Richard ||
11/21/2014 13:26 Comments ||
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#9
For a short time following the fall of the Communists Russia had a chance to join the Western community of nations. And true to custom, it has failed to do so.
You saying like it was a bad thing---not joining a bunch of psychotic degenerates with their lips stuck to Muzzi asses.
#12
You can't eat or drink oil. All it's going to take is two bad crop years in a row, and Russia goes hungry. They'll either end up spending their oil money on food, or their population decreases even faster. A "little Ice Age" -- a total possibility -- would devastate Russia for a hundred years or more, no matter how much oil and gas they have. Food is more important.
If I were the managers of Monsanto, I'd be working night and day on a low-temperature, low-moisture crop that could produce food at temps as low as 40F. We may very well need it, not only for us, but for the rest of the world. It's that, or another major war.
Posted by: Old Patriot ||
11/21/2014 16:54 Comments ||
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#13
A lower oil price will no doubt take some of the sass off them.
[IsraelTimes] Really, the last thing any of us wants to do on a day like this is write.
All we want to do is grieve -- for the loss of innocent lives, and over the mind-numbing, vicious, brutal, bloody evidence of the depths to which human beings can sink.
We want to mourn for the families, the worlds torn apart.
We want to scream at the injustice.
We want to fume at the way the murder of Jews at prayer by Paleostinian Death Eaters somehow gets misrepresented, in some cases flatly misreported, as an Israeli sin -- as death that we brought upon ourselves. We struggle to follow the "logic" of such false reporting, but it seems to revolve around the "crime" of some Jewish activists provoking the Moslem world by seeking the right for Jews to pray at the holiest site in Judaism, the Temple Mount -- a demand that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has clarified almost daily he has no intention of accepting.
That "crime," and the fact that a Paleostinian bus driver for the Egged Israeli cooperative was found hanged in a bus on Sunday night. The police ruled out foul play, and an autopsy pointed to suicide, but why would the facts get in the way of a good pretext for further anti-Jewish incitement?
Nobody wants to write on a terrible day like this, but there are some points that have to be made, nevertheless.
There has been much criticism of the Israeli leadership in recent weeks for pointing the finger of blame at Paleostinian Authority President the ineffectual Mahmoud Abbas ... a graduate of the prestigious unaccredited Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow with a doctorate in Holocaust Denial... as the terror wave has risen in Jerusalem, when it is argued that Hamas, always the voice of sweet reason, and other bad boy Paleostinian groups are the primary terrorism-inflamers. But Abbas and his loyalists have emphatically swung to the extremes in the last few weeks -- the relative moderates legitimizing terrorism. The PA chief accused Israel of "genocide" in Gazoo from the UN General Assembly podium less than two months ago. Last week, he warned against settlers and forces of Evil "contaminating" Al-Aqsa Mosque. His Fatah loyalists have published cartoons and Facebook posts hailing and encouraging terrorism, and encouraged "days of rage" to defend the purportedly threatened Al-Aqsa. He hailed the would-be assassin of Rabbi Yehudah Glick, a prime advocate of Jewish and Moslem prayer on the sacred mount, as a martyr.
Abbas, who swore in an Israeli television interview two years ago that there would be no new armed intifada against Israel so long as he led the Paleostinian Authority, and insisted that he had no demands on pre-1967 Israel, has thus helped foster the climate for a new armed intifada which on Tuesday saw despicable, premeditated Paleostinian murder of Jews at prayer inside pre-1967 Israel.
"Jerusalem is starting to burn. Religious fervor is intensifying," I wrote here less than two weeks ago. On a day when Paleostinian Death Eaters chose to target Jews at prayer in a synagogue, the centrality of religious dispute to this latest iteration of the Israeli-Paleostinian conflict is now unmistakable.
And at the core of this new iteration, Tuesday's attack made murderously clear, is Moslem intolerance -- of the very notion that Jews have a religious connection to the Temple Mount, and by extension to Jerusalem and to Israel.
Appallingly in the last few weeks, Abbas made himself a party to this intolerance. Unlike Hamas, he does not openly call for Israel's destruction. He may not, in his heart of hearts, even seek it. But he has allied himself to the forces of Evil in castigating as "contamination" the Jewish desire to express the link to the site of the Biblical temples, the site that roots our historical legitimacy here.
Because the final thing that has to be put in writing, even on a horrible, evil day like this, when the fingers loathe the necessity to tap the keyboard, is that it's not going to work. Paleostinian terrorists, and those who incite them and support them, should know: We are not going to be shot and stabbed and bludgeoned out of here by your brutality and the false justifications you invoke to legitimate it.
We stood firm during year upon year of Second Intifada terrorism, when you were blowing up our buses, malls, restaurants and supermarkets, and pragmatism could have dictated that we do what the terrorism was designed to make us do: flee. We do not insist on maintaining our majority Jewish state to the exclusion of your rights. Anything but. We seek co-existence. But your rights cannot be achieved by denying us ours.
For this is the homeland of the Jewish nation, the only place we have ever been sovereign or sought illusory sovereignty. And what needs writing and saying, most especially on a terrible day like today, is that we will not be driven from it.
#1
One of the things the Arab mindset can't imagine is the Israelis finally turning on them and slaughtering them all. Yet that's just what they're driving them to do. It's going to be a terrible, terrible surprise when it happens, and it will. It's already beginning.
Posted by: Old Patriot ||
11/21/2014 21:30 Comments ||
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The President has announced his executive order driven amnesty program, and I have seen many people in near panic. In another conference one chap said “I watched an elected president of the United States [do something unmentionable] with the United States Constitution and the rule of law tonight. It was a tragic event that reminded me of nothing so much as of Hitler in the 30’s.”
I understand the emotional response, but I would not go that far
Eighty percent of voters polled on Election Day say new jobs should go to Americans and legal immigrants, not to illegal immigrants, including the potential beneficiaries of President Barack Obama’s planned executive amnesty, says an election-day poll of 806 voters.
“Voters overwhelmingly prefer an immigration system that protects American workers,” says a memo released with the poll by Kellyanne Conway, founder of the polling company.
“Members of Congress should feel confident that voters will support actions using the power of the purse to protect American workers from Obama’s executive amnesty threat,” the memo said.
GOP leaders, including House Speaker John Boehner and incoming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, have already warned Obama against announcing an amnesty or enforcement rollback.
The new telephone survey of 806 voters matches other data showing that most Americans strongly oppose Obama immigration policies, and that many members of his base and that many Latinos also oppose his immigration policies.
Seventy-four percent of respondents in the election-day poll say the president “should work with Congress rather than around Congress on immigration … [and] 80 percent want new jobs created by the economy to go to American workers and legal immigrants already in the country,” said the memo.
It showed that “majorities of men (75%), women (74%), whites (79%), blacks (59%), and Hispanics (54%) all recommended that the President collaborate with Congress before changing immigration law.”
#3
If the ruling class had in fact secured the border as the public demanded in the 00's, amnesty would be negotiated now. Consensus would have been achieved. Instead Dear Leader betrays and throws down the border.
#6
majorities of men (75%), women (74%), whites (79%), blacks (59%), and Hispanics (54%)
Doesn't mean squat in view of the large number of pro-amnesty representatives those same voters just sent back to the Congress. Interesting how this highly valued issue was not discussed in the recent Congressional campaigns.
h/t Jerry Pournelle
Three problems plague the debate over whether all combat units should finally be opened to women. (Actually, there are four problems: The fourth and most important being the likelihood that there will be no real debate, something that I hope this article will help to mitigate). Most career soldiers and officers I know believe the integration of women into Special Forces teams, and into SEAL, Ranger and Marine infantry platoons, is already a forgone conclusion. From their perspective, politicians in uniform (namely, top brass) don’t have the intestinal fortitude to brook the vocal minority in Congress – and the country, really – who think mainstreaming women into ground combat units is a good idea.
As for the other three problems, the first is that every sentient adult knows what happens when you mix healthy young men and women together in small groups for extended periods of time. Just look at any workplace. Couples form. At some point, how couples interact – sexually, emotionally, happily and/or unhappily – makes life uncomfortable for those around them. Factor in intense, intimate conditions and you can forget about adults being able to stay professional 24/7. Object lesson for anyone who disagrees: General Petraeus.
Problem number two: Those who favor lifting the combat exclusion ban engage in a clever sleight of hand whenever they equate women serving in combat with women serving in combat units. Given women’s performance over the past decade in Afghanistan and Iraq, who but a misogynist would doubt their capacity for courage, aggressiveness or grace under fire at this point? But battles are like exclamation points. They punctuate long stretches when there are no firefights. Spend time around soldiers when they are coming down from adrenaline highs, or are depressed or upset; they are prone to all sorts of temptations. Alternatively, under Groundhog Day-like conditions, troops invariably grow bored and frustrated. How quickly we forget Charles Graner and Lynndie England, and the dynamic between them that helped fuel the sadism at Abu Ghraib.
Problem number three involves a different elision. Proponents of lifting the ban love to invoke desegregation and the demise of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Their intent in doing so is to suggest that all three are of a piece: Blacks now serve in combat units, as do (at least in theory) openly homosexual soldiers, and there have been no untoward effects. It is therefore past time to let women be all that they can be as well. Except that attraction between the sexes is nothing like the denigration of another race or the disinterest (or disgust) heterosexual men feel when it comes to the idea of one man pursuing another.
Indeed, racism and bigotry lie at the opposite end of the spectrum from attraction. Lumping all three together is a canard.
There is no clearer way to put it than this: Heterosexual men like women. They also compete for their attention. This is best captured by the Darwinist aphorism: male-male competition and female choice. Or, try: no female has to leave a bar alone if she doesn’t want to, whereas at ‘last call’ lots of men do.
Cast back through history or just look cross-culturally: Men’s abiding interest in women (and women’s interest in having men be interested) creates limitless potential for friction. Is this really what we want to inflict on combat units?
More than a decade ago, I described the critical ethos on teams, and in squads or platoons, as ‘one for all and all for one.’ Introduce something over which members are bound to compete, that the winner won’t share, and you inject a dangerous dynamic. Worse, introduce the possibility of exclusivity between two individuals and you will have automatically killed cohesion.
#1
Mission drops with the rifles when they find a woman has been kid-napped by the enemy. She becomes mission #1, and it can't be that way. Lines fall apart.
In a few hours' time, the President of the United States will apparently do to his oath of office what the Islamic State does to its captives. As I said to Hugh Hewitt the other day, even a constitution of meticulously constructed checks and balances requires a certain seemliness of its political class. This chief executive is brazen in his lawlessness, and ever more so. And he has calculated that those who object lack the stomach to do anything about it. We shall see.
However, I would like also to note another example of presidential brazenness this week - Barack Obama's reaction to the latest beheading of a US citizen by the head hackers of the Islamic State. Peter Kassig's death video was not as the others:
David Haines and Alan Henning – both from Britain – and Americans James Foley and Steven Sotloff each made statements before their deaths in earlier videos. Each held Barack Obama or David Cameron to blame for their deaths, because of American and British military action against Isil in Iraq and Syria.
There was no such statement from Peter Kassig. Instead, "Jihadi John" appears with Mr Kassig's severed head, and sneers, "He doesn't have much to say."
Indeed. But I wonder what he had to say in the last moments of his life. Evidently not a statement blaming Obama for his predicament. Perhaps he even pushed back against his executioner in a more forceful way. In Mark Steyn's Passing Parade, in an essay on another westerner beheaded by the jihadists, I salute someone who declined to go gentle into that good night:
Consider Fabrizio Quattrocchi, murdered in Iraq on April 14th. In the moment before his death, he yanked off his hood and cried defiantly, "I will show you how an Italian dies!" He ruined the movie for his killers. As a snuff video and recruitment tool, it was all but useless, so much so that the Arabic TV stations declined to show it.
Evidently, Mr Kassig also ruined the movie for his killers. We will never know how. The classical idea of "the good death" has little resonance in today's western world, except perhaps among its soldiery - and Mr Kassig was not just another deluded humanitarian tourist in the heart of darkness but a battle-hardened army ranger. Did he show his captors "how an American dies"?
If so, President Obama had no compunction about dishonoring his death. At the Rose Garden ceremony for Bowe Bergdahl's parents, the President decided to pass off a deserter as an American hero. In his response to the beheading of Peter Kassig, Obama chose to turn a man who may have died heroically into just another Muslim victim:
Abdul-Rahman was taken from us in an act of pure evil by a terrorist group that the world rightly associates with inhumanity... ISIL's actions represent no faith, least of all the Muslim faith which Abdul-Rahman adopted as his own.
"Abdul-Rahman"? Why, yes. Mr Kassig supposedly converted to Islam while imprisoned by the Islamic State. That's to say, his submission to Islam was at the point of a sword. In America, at home, at liberty, he was not a Muslim. He was a Muslim only in captivity.
And to be pedantic about it, Peter Kassig was not, in law, Abdul-Rahman Kassig. He would not have been recognized by any government agency anywhere in the Republic of Paperwork under that name - not by the DMV, not by the Social Security Administration, not by the TSA, not by the Obamacare website. So why is the head of the US government recognizing Mr Kassig by a name none of his minions would? Obama's court eunuchs at The New York Times explained it this way:
The president used the Muslim name that Mr. Kassig adopted after his capture, making the point that the Islamic State had killed a fellow Muslim.
Why is that "the point" the President feels he has to make? In the same video in which "Jihadi John" appears with Mr Kassig's head, the Islamic State are seen decapitating 13 fellow Muslims from the Syrian army. If you're a Muslim, you get the group beheading with the crowd-scene extras. If you're an American or Briton, you get the star role, the solo act. The Islamic State knew which group Peter Kassig belonged to even if the President didn't.
Although my book is somewhat amazingly propping up the nether regions of the Top Ten humor bestsellers, quite a bit of The [Un]documented Mark Steyn deals with the all too deadly serious subject of Obama and others' prostration before Islam, and the iniquities of one-way multiculturalism - which in the end will destroy us. The wretched statement by this disgraceful president was, to go out as we came in, an especially brazen example. Peter Kassig died as he did not because he was "a fellow Muslim" but because he was an American. He deserved to be honored as one.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
After a frosty reception at the G20 summit in Australia this week, Russian President Vladimir Putin required some much needed rest, at least according to the official explanation given for his conspicuously early departure from the proceedings. All things considered it could have been a lot worse. Russia finds itself in familiar territory after a controversial half-year, highlighted by the bloody and still unresolved situation in Ukraine. Nonetheless, the prospect of further sanctions looms low and Russia's stores of oil and gas remain high.
