Nena: Nur Geträumt

The twentyfirst century is such a fraud.  And the fall of the wall was such a vain promise.  But once.

Shocked, Just Shocked I Say !

Today in news we already knew...kinda sorta:

Frederick Forsyth 'set to reveal he was an MI6 spy'

Day of the Jackal author Frederick Forsyth is expected to reveal in his forthcoming autobiography that he was an agent of the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6

He has long been lauded for the uncanny realism of his spy thrillers, and now Frederick Forsyth is set to reveal the secret of his insider knowledge: he was himself an agent for MI6.

Fans of the 76-year-old author had suspected he may have had brushes with the Secret Intelligence Service, as MI6 is formally known, and Forsyth is expected to confirm they were right when his autobiography is published in September.

As a journalist for the BBC and Reuters, Forsyth spent time based in Communist East Germany and in Africa, where he became close to key figures including Odumegwu Ojukwu, leader of the Nigerian breakaway state of Biafra.

He has admitted in the past that he often draws on his real-life experiences for the plots and action in his books; his experience of reporting on an attempt to assassinate the French president Charles de Gaulle gave him the idea for his first novel, The Day of the Jackal.

He has also admitted having friends in MI6. In his newspaper column Forsyth has referred to “taking lunch with a senior officer of from the Secret Intelligence Service” though he did not explain how they knew each other and he has never gone as far as revealing that he was recruited by them.

Been so long since I saw them referred to as SIS that I almost thought they'd just dropped that in favour of the colloquial -- Hell, I still hear the FSB referred to in the media as the KGB for that matter.

Any writers out there relying purely on actual imagination, or is that just an urban myth ?

Fair Observer* on Ukraine's Financial Difficulties

Ukraine on Brink of Financial Collapse

Will Europe allow a bankrupt Ukraine to fall back under Russian domination?

Ukraine is lost either way.  It's become an expendable pawn in the new Cold War.  Sorry.

Ukraine is on the brink of financial collapse. The country is unable to meet interest payments. Its gross domestic product (GDP) fell by 6.8% in 2014 and is expected to fall by an even greater extent this year. Meanwhile, it has to defend itself against a neighbor that guaranteed its borders as recently as 1994.

That sucks.

Instead of stepping forward to help Ukraine financially, the European Union (EU) and the United States are both leaving the job to the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

I'm shocked.

The IMF is offering Ukraine $40 billion, whereas the EU says it can only manage $2 billion.

No !  Not the IMF !  Never !

The European Union has already extended 40 times as much credit to Greece as it has given to Ukraine, whose population is four times that of Greece. If this ratio reflects the EU’s real priority, it is unbalanced. GDP per head in Greece is about three times that of Ukraine.

Did I not mention already that the West doesn't give a shit about the people of Ukraine ?

Like Greece, Ukraine has a lot to do in order to create a functioning and efficient legal and administrative system, stamp out corruption and collect taxes fully and fairly. But Ukraine has to do this while recovering from the effects of a communist system that was imposed on it from outside since 1919, whereas Greece has been the democratic shaper of its own policies for many years.

Fuck you.

Of course, Greece is in the EU and the euro and Ukraine is not, but both countries are in Europe and aspire to a democratic European future.

Aspire away, do...for so long as the Union lasts anyways.

Furthermore Ukraine had it borders guaranteed in the Budapest Declaration of 1994 by EU countries, Russia and the US, in return for giving up nuclear weapons.

Ukraine trusted the West to come through on its promises ?  Bless.

Despite this, Ukraine was invaded and a portion of its territory was annexed in 2014 by Russia, because Kiev wanted to make a modest cooperation agreement with the EU.

That's what happened alright.

Notwithstanding this, the EU is now being stingy in helping Ukraine manage its financial crisis, while instead being fixated on the drama in Athens.

Urm, it was stingy, then.  No, 'stingy' doesn't do it justice.  They were willing to let Ukraine crash and burn rather than work with Yanukovych on any kind of open terms.  They willingly let Putin hold the country's economy hostage.

Ukrainians believe they have a European destiny and are prepared to die for it.

Are they really ?

The Russian leadership, on the other hand, believes that Ukraine, with its Russian-speaking minority, is in their sphere of influence. Moscow sees a link up of Ukraine with the European Union as a form of foreign interference in its own backyard.

Yup.  That's exactly right.  And they made that 100% clear from the beginning.

One would have to respond that this view is not in accordance with Russia’s guarantee to Ukraine in 1994, nor with international law.

Nuclear weapons trump international law every time.  Nations seek them for a reason.  The established powers want to maintain a monopoly on them for a reason.  Oh, and the Russians lied.

The entire post-World War II European security order rests on acceptance of international law. Similarly, any prospect of voluntary nuclear disarmament in the future depends on solemn obligations—like the 1994 Budapest Declaration—being honored.

Clearly, we're fucked.


*  No, I'd never heard of them before either.

What Happened to the Dinosaurs, Daddy ?

America needs to replace a rotting arsenal of nuclear weapons and counteract an increasingly boisterous Russia, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee said Tuesday. For these reasons, it must consider the long-taboo prospect of building new nukes.

“Can we have a national conversation about building new nuclear weapons?” Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, said in remarks at the Atlantic Council in Washington, D.C. “That’s something we haven’t been able to even have a conversation about for a while, but I think we’re going to have to.”

“Russia obviously retains the right if needed to deploy its nuclear weapons anywhere on its national territory, including on the Crimean Peninsula,” Mikhail Ulyanov, head of the Russian Department for Non-Proliferation and Arms Control, said in early June.Just last week, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced his plans to boost the former Soviet power’s nuclear arsenal with 40 new missiles. The plan follows a string of provocative comments from top Russian officials who consider a nuclear weapon the most effective method of countering what they consider NATO’s provocative actions in Eastern Europe.

Thornberry said Tuesday this is more than enough justification for considering a new supply of offensive nukes.

None of this had to happen.  We had peace.  We had reason for hope.  We also had idiotic Russophobic politicians who treated Russia like shit after the end of the last cold war, and helped enable the rise of Putin.  Five decades somehow survived without destroying the world, and, having learned nothing from history, we immediately started sowing the seeds of the next war.  Sigh.

Just Madness Everywhere

2015, and we still seemingly have racially motivated attacks on historically black churches in the Southern United States. Wonder what the cooling-off-period is between a shooting and the inevitable right-wing response that it all could have been prevented if only everyone were armed.  Elementary Schools, Universities...why not Churches ?  Arm the congregation and clergy alike.

Elsewhere in the news, Hong Kong still seemingly hasn't come to terms with the consequences of returning to mainland-rule and the fact that the PRC never had any intention whatsoever of allowing actual democracy to prevail under its rule, even in its special administrative regions,...NATO is continuing its lunatic tit-for-tat escalation with Russia by acting out war-games off the coast of Kaliningrad,...and bankers Goldman Sachs are attempting to show how humane they are and how great their concern for their staffinterns desperate for any foothold on the jobs-ladder to pay off student-debt, by insisting that they only work a maximum seventeen-hour workday.

And then there's this:

The increasingly tense relationship between the United States and Russia might be about to face a new challenge: a Russian investigation into American moon landings.

In an op-ed published by Russian newspaper Izvestia, Vladimir Markin, a spokesman for the government's official Investigative Committee, argued that such an investigation could reveal new insights into the historical space journeys.

According to a translation by the Moscow Times, Markin would support an inquiry into the disappearance of original footage from the first moon landing in 1969 and the whereabouts of lunar rock, which was brought back to Earth during several missions.

“We are not contending that they did not fly [to the moon], and simply made a film about it. But all of these scientific — or perhaps cultural — artifacts are part of the legacy of humanity, and their disappearance without a trace is our common loss. An investigation will reveal what happened,” Markin wrote, according to the Moscow Times translation.

Er, what, why ?.

So, why is Investigative Committee member Markin speculating about conspiracy theories surrounding US moon landings that happened decades ago? In his op-ed, the Russian official also emphasized that “US authorities had crossed a line by launching a large-scale corruption probe targeting nine Fifa officials,” according to the Moscow Times.

We're descending to this level of pettiness in our new cold war already ?

Well, why ever not ?  The US hadn't even started its war in Iraq (you know the one I mean, don't quibble) before it was going after its own erstwhile allies with that 'freedom fries' & 'old Europe' nonsense.  This is how we do geopolitics in the twenty-first century apparently.  The grownups left the game long ago.

Madness

Well you lunatics in DC & the EU wanted a new Cold War, and now you have it.  Good news for the military-industrial complex.

MOSCOW — Russia's military will add over 40 new intercontinental ballistic missiles this year alone that are capable of piercing any missile defenses, President Vladimir Putin said Tuesday in a blunt reminder of the nation's nuclear might amid tensions with the West over Ukraine.

Putin spoke at the opening of an arms show at a shooting range in Alabino just west of Moscow, a huge display intended to showcase Russia's resurgent military.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg accused the Russians of "nuclear saber-rattling," and said that was one of the reasons the western military alliance has been beefing up its ability to defend its members.

So, something the Russians just announced in response to your recent promise of permanently placing more tanks and heavy artillery in Eastern Europe is the reason for you doing the same ?  What crazy circular logic is that ?  It's called tit-for-tat you fools.  And it's as stupid a game in which to participate as Russian roulette.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, briefing reporters via teleconference from Boston, where he is recovering from surgery on a broken leg, called Putin's announcement concerning.

"We're trying to move in the opposite direction," Kerry said. "We have had enormous cooperation from the 1990s forward with respect to the structure of nuclear weapons in the former territories of the Soviet Union. And no one wants to see us step backwards."

You lying sack of shit !  Sorry, but chutzpah doesn't describe it.  There just isn't a word sufficient for such shameless lying.  Not that our stenographer-media in the West will call him on it.

But now that the nasty Russians are building more missiles, you'll have to announce another escalation on your part, won't you ?  To which the Russians will respond, to which you will respond, and so on...

...Until mushroom-clouds grace the skylines of every major metropolis.  Whee !

We Are All Collectively Insane

U.S. might deploy missiles in Europe to counter Russia

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Obama administration is weighing a range of aggressive responses to Russia's alleged violation of a Cold War-era nuclear treaty, including deploying land-based missiles in Europe that could pre-emptively destroy the Russian weapons.

The Russians' violations of Cold War-agreements huh ?  You really want to go there ?  Really ?  No, no,...really...?

This "counterforce" option is among possibilities the administration is considering as it reviews its entire policy toward Russia in light of Moscow's military intervention in Ukraine, its annexation of Crimea and other actions the U.S. deems confrontational in Europe and beyond.

The options go so far as one implied - but not stated explicitly - that would improve the ability of U.S. nuclear weapons to destroy military targets on Russian territory.

Yippee !!!

Wait, what weapons exactly are we talking about here ?  That word, pre-emptive...I don't like that word.  It calls to mind another era, in a very very bad way.

The Arrow

Speaking of the CBC, and the fiction that Canada can these days defend itself without being entirely dependent upon the protection of its pimpthe United States, got me thinking of this maybe not totally authentically historical but still awesome piece about the Avro Arrow...and what could have been.  And yay, it's on YouTube.

A US 'Nuclear Umbrella' for Saudi Arabia ?

From the LA Times:

Obama administration officials are promising a major strengthening of U.S. defense commitments to Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf allies, possibly including a nuclear commitment to their security, in an intensifying effort to win their support for the proposed nuclear deal with Iran.

Officials say they hope to reassure nervous gulf Arab states by providing more military aid and training to their defense forces, and by making more explicit commitments to help them repel external attacks.

The administration is studying whether to make any nuclear assurances, though officials emphasize no decision has been made.

...

One challenge for the White House is whether it can expand a defense relationship that already is enormous.

...

It's also not clear that U.S. nuclear security commitments would be useful or welcomed by the gulf states.

The administration would have a hard time trying to get Congress, which has been skeptical about the U.S.-Saudi relationship, to enact a treaty that put a U.S. nuclear "umbrella" over Arab Sunni nations, as the United States has over Japan and South Korea.

Such agreements aim to deter nuclear attack by warning foes that the United States would retaliate with overwhelming force if an ally is attacked with a nuclear weapon.

...

Another possible gesture would be to declare the gulf states "major non-NATO allies," said Thomas Lippman, a Saudi specialist at the nonpartisan Middle East Institute in Washington. The designation, applied to close allies like Japan, Australia and Israel, provides special help in buying weapons and obtaining U.S. weapons.

This, if true, is insane.  Though I do wonder about the article's provenance.  Sure are a lot of unspecified 'officials' mentioned in the article.  And it doesn't appear to actually be a new story at that.  Seems it was being reported in the Israeli media over a month ago:

http://www.jpost.com/Middle-East/Analysis-US-Sunni-states-talk-about-regional-nuclear-umbrella-393131

http://www.haaretz.com/news/1.645573

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/192178

From the latter two, it seems their source was an Arabic paper, al-Hayat.  Huh.


I want to be sceptical.  But this is Barack Obama & John Kerry we're talking about.  Given the completely ham-handed way they've handled Ukraine...I think I could believe it.  And so what happens next ?  Does Russia do a deal with Iran to promise them their own 'nuclear umbrella' ?  What could possibly go wrong with drawing the battlelines of a new Cold War between the West and Russia across the heart of the Middle East and the Sunni/Shia divide ?  Have we learned nothing in the hundred years since, from the Great War of 1914-18 ?

Insane.

Defining a new Security Architecture for Europe That Brings Russia in from the Cold: Roundtable discussion in Brussels with John Mearsheimer, Stephen Cohen and Katrina vanden Heuvel

So much sense spoken in one room.  No snark here.  Suppose it had to happen in Brussels, rather than in the US media.

Part 1, Presentations by the Panelists:

Part 2, Discussion with Panelists and Participants:

Genesis: Land of Confusion

Apologies to Ukraine

My apologies to the people of Ukraine.  Our leaders continue to rant and rave as if they are going to risk military confrontation with Russia over the conflict in Donetsk and Luhansk, as if Russia can be forced to hand back Crimea.  It's cruel, the false hopes they persist in encouraging.  They're liars, and they can't admit the truth.

Sorry to have to say it, but the Ukraine you knew is gone...forever, and no amount of bluster or outrage will bring it back.  No, it isn't fair, but as parents say to their children, life isn't either.  And we tolerate plenty of unfairness we could do something about, never mind the things we can't.  Men earning more than women isn't fair, or whites earning more than minorities, or CEO's earning multiples in the hundreds of what their lowest paid employees get.  We tolerate income inequality, just as we tolerate homelessness, poor families going hungry, disproportionate incarceration of minorities, businesses colluding against consumers, politicians selling their office to the highest bidder.  We imprison whistleblowers pointing out the crimes of our governments, whilst war criminals go free.  We have an exceptionally high tolerance for unfairness generally.

And as for unfair territorial disputes or questions of sovereignty ?  We allow our greatest trading partner to bully its neighbours, and persistently threaten one of them (a peaceful democratic ally of ours) with use of military force up to and including nuclear weapons.  We've allowed an entire population in the West Bank and Gaza to be held hostage as political pawns, to be kept in amber as a perpetual 'refugee' population, decades after the wars that made them refugees.  We allow a population of twenty-five million in North Korea to be imprisoned under an insane radical dictatorship that threatens us with nuclear war because it suits the People's Republic of China to have it there between them and US-ally South Korea as a buffer state.  We won't be waging any 'wars of liberation' in North Korea anytime soon, will we ?  An entire state sacrificed for the realpolitik concerns of China, and we won't do anything about it...because we can't.

Iron Maiden: Two Minutes to Midnight

Going for the obvious as usual...

Doomsday Clock at 3 minutes to midnight due to 

global warming and rising nuclear tensions

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (BAS) has announced that the minute hand of the Doomsday Clock will be adjusted from five to three minutes to midnight, and that urgent action is required to prevent an imminent global catastrophe.

In particular, the BAS cited the continued global nuclear weapons modernisation, halting of nuclear reduction and unchecked climate change as key reasons why the clock has been moved forward.

The BAS' Science and Security Board said in a statement: "In 2015, with the Clock hand moved forward to three minutes to midnight, the board feels compelled to add, with a sense of great urgency: 'The probability of global catastrophe is very high, and the actions needed to reduce the risks of disaster must be taken very soon.'"

The BAS is a group of international scientists, which includes 18 Nobel laureates.

"The world will be between 3-8 degrees Celsius warmer by the end of the century. Global emissions rates are now 50% higher than in 1990," Richard Somerville, a member of the BAS' Science and Security Board and a distinguished professor emeritus at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California San Diego, said at the press conference.

"Efforts at reducing global emissions of heat-trapping gases have so far been entirely insufficient to prevent unacceptable climate disruption.

"Unless much greater emissions reductions occur very soon, the countries of the world will have emitted enough carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases by the end of this century to profoundly transform the Earth's climate."

All I'll say is this: I'm ashamed of my generation, and I'm ashamed of the assholes who came before, and those of their generations still in power who are willfully raping the future of their grandchildren and great-grandchildren for their own selfish short-term gain. And I have little reason to hold out any hope whatsoever for the so-called millenials. Who could say when we're gone, that our species didn't deserve it ? And we laugh at the fucking dinosaurs !

Buran: The Soviet Space Shuttle

A fact rarely remembered, but, in the dying days of the Soviet Union, the USSR had and launched at least one successful test flight of its own space shuttle: The Buran.  A craft that oh so coincidentally seemed almost an exact twin of NASA's shuttles, just as NASA's earliest orbital rockets happened to be the not so subtle twins of the V-rockets that rained down on Britain from the Third Reich, and just as China's latest stealth planes just so happen to look like carbon-copy clones of their American counterparts.  What comes around and all that.

No idea who originally put together the videos herein, but the soundtrack is suggestive of the perspective behind it.  And who indeed knows what might have been had we ended up ruled by a different despotic overlord rather than the one that happened to win out in our modern day Game of Thrones ?  Most born today presumably will scarce be able to countenance the possibility of the (first ?) Cold War having gone differently, just as we can't easily conceive of different outcomes for the (first two ?) so-called World Wars and the various (American, French, Russian, some other countries we don't really care about) revolutions of the past few centuries.  Always healthy to gain what little perspective one can with a taste, however fanciful, of what might have been.

Oh, and say what you will of the US Shuttles, the fact that the US in grounding them willingly placed itself in almost total dependence upon Putin's Russia at a time of growing tensions, even prior to the Ukrainian provocations (by which I mean, the expansionary and de-stabilising activities of the EU & NATO, lest I be misunderstood), is indeed almost funny.  Almost, were it not for the fact of us continuing to be eager to pretend that the threats of nuclear war have somehow vanished with the end of the cold war, when in fact nothing of the sort is or ever was remotely the case, and when the actual threat of global nuclear annihilation is probably as great today as it was in the time of our grandparents.  Of course the planet may well boil if we carry on burning fossil fuels at the current rate, possibly before we get the chance to blow ourselves up, so it may be a moot point.  Stupid fucking humans !

The Bar-Kays: Soul Finger/Spies Like Us

The threat of impending apocalypse in the eighties was so hilarious...

Big Finish 162: Protect and Survive

Big Finish stories of recent years generally aren't what they used to be, but there's still the occasional rare gem, and Protect and Survive is one of these.  Since the end of the cold war, most, in the west at least, have been happy to forget the period as if the potentially world-ending conflict between East and West never happened, and the cold war has over time become a less and less common subject for popular fiction.  That this trend may now be coming to an end, as evidenced by the like of the recent BBC series 'The Game' is a sad reflection on our contemporary politics, as the idiots who run our foreign policy, seemingly desperately hungry for a new cold war, if not worse, go out of their way to seek confrontation and discord with Putin's Russia.  Strange how soon we forget, even seemingly those of us who lived through the sixties, seventies, or eighties.  How we once grew up somehow having to be reconciled with, or in denial of, the fact that we lived under constant threat of nuclear holocaust.  The threat never truly went away, and may even be greater today than it was then, but somehow with all the weight of history behind us, and all the knowledge previous generations lacked (such as just how close we really came to annihilation during the Cuban Missile Crisis), we'd still rather forget the uncomfortable truth of the recent past.  And as for the near-religious belief in the US in the ultimate victory over Communism, in the 'American Century', in the 'single Superpower', in 'American Exceptionalism', well that particular mindset seems bedded in for a generation or two at least.  And in the interim, as we shift political power from the generation of the Cheney's and Rumsfeld's to that of the millennials, who have grown up blissfully ignorant of the still very real nuclear threat hanging over the planet ?  Well, we're fucked, aren't we ?

Protect and Survive plunges Ace and Hex right into the very apocalypse many of us grew us fearing, and keeps them there in one of the tightest, more claustrophobic, and most atmospheric releases of recent years.  The title is taken from a remarkable series of public information films and pamphlets that were genuinely produced in the UK in the 80's with the intent of reassuring and pacifying the public in the event of a nuclear attack from the USSR.  Most Americans of a certain age are probably at least vaguely aware of the 'Duck and Cover' pieces of the fifties and sixties, but we're talking about the nineteen-eighties here, and trying to convince modern Britons that taping up their windows and hiding in their cellar for a few days would somehow protect them from the awesome explosions and fallout of the Soviet Union's most powerful weapons, each of them exponentially more powerful than those used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Protect and Survive does a fine job of both capturing the ultimate futility of such efforts, and imagining the horror of facing the desperate reality of the 'survivors' of a nuclear attack, and in the case of Hex and Ace doing so over and over and over again.

This being modern Big Finish, it is unsurprisingly part of a three-part 'trilogy', and the larger story here regarding the Elder Gods frankly isn't much to get very excited about, but while the focus remains on Ace & Hex and the elderly couple whose shelter they share, the drama and tension is some of the best one could expect from Big Finish.  Sylvester McCoy's Doctor remains hidden in the shadows for much of the story, being eventually revealed as much more of the spider at the centre of the web, in keeping with his history on TV, and reflecting a theme of abandonment by the Doctor that seems increasingly common with Who, both on audio and TV, in this case giving Sophie Aldred and Philip Olivier that much more opportunity to bounce off one another and to shine in the Doctor's absence.  Sound design and editing throughout are excellent.  Would that it were financially possible for BF to return to an era of far fewer ranges, and one in which each of the main monthly releases could reach this level or better...

If you truly want to add to your nightmares, the original Protect and Survive videos are available at the Imperial War Museum (http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/1060022098) and elsewhere, and remember that this was our actual very recent history, and part of an imagining that could still reflect our very imminent future...or lack thereof.  Stupid humans !

http://www.bigfinish.com/releases/v/protect-and-survive-330