new Cold War?

[Doktor]

Mate,

Your elections are over and you are still contaminated ;)

[Versus]

Mate,

Your elections are over and you are still contaminated ;)

You have no idea how hazardous it was. Some guy took my brother's video (made for kids) and turned it into political parody with the Vucic as a "Rescueman" super hero that fights snow. It was hilarious. But yeah, it will take me some time to recover, the brain damage is severe.

[Doktor]

You have no idea how hazardous it was. Some guy took my brother's video (made for kids) and turned it into political parody with the Vucic as a "Rescueman" super hero that fights snow. It was hilarious. But yeah, it will take me some time to recover, the brain damage is severe.

We have Presidential and Early Parliamentary Elections in April.

Stupid politicos, we give them 4 years to rule, they come back every 2 years to make the current position stronger.

Friends from Italy invited me to stay there entire April. Am seriously thinking to accept the offer.

[Officer of Engineers]

I don't think I follow. It's not something that can be done overnight and my google-fu says even it gets downsized from original plans.

No, we're not going to turn CFS Baffin Island to CFB Baffin Island. What I was pointing to that, of all the powers laying claim, Canada is the easiest to enforce it.

Or are you saying the funding and the greens will be sat in the last row and this will be a top priority?

Naval funding priority are new ships and get the VICTORIAS out. Bang for buck, those VICTORIAs will put a crimp in Russian claims.

[Skywatcher]

No, we're not going to turn CFS Baffin Island to CFB Baffin Island. What I was pointing to that, of all the powers laying claim, Canada is the easiest to enforce it.

And looks like it'll stay that way for a while. Russian Navy, outside of its nuclear submarines and the occasional frigate, is a mess.

[Doktor]

No, we're not going to turn CFS Baffin Island to CFB Baffin Island. What I was pointing to that, of all the powers laying claim, Canada is the easiest to enforce it.

You will have to organize a referendum first :red:

Naval funding priority are new ships and get the VICTORIAS out. Bang for buck, those VICTORIAs will put a crimp in Russian claims.

Latest from SIPRI is that your MilEx was cut in 2012 by 5% or $1bn. I don't know what is the trend at the moment hence why I asked.

[Officer of Engineers]

Crimea just happenned and the budget is already passed. There is no immediate new monies if you're asking. What will happen is the shifting of budget monies within NDHQ. Army battle qualifications will be cut in favour of increased northern patrols.

[Parihaka]

One can only hope, but didn't it all started in '70s? Also, USSR had nuclear peak in the mid '80s.

Why the Green movement has gained momentum back then?

As the communists fled that organisation they repackaged themselves with the Mother Earth hippies and were reborn as the modern greens. Tyrants of that nature are always there, they just get far less air time during times of stress.

[GVChamp]

Ukraine is a non-core nation that we were willing to let enter a full economic melt-down. Russia took an ethnically Russia part of said nation almost without firing a shot.
You want to start a Cold War over that?
I don't see the point. Hopefully this is a good wake-up call to the West not to cut its defense spending to slingshots, row boats, and health-care, but this is not the Soviet Union that put missiles in Cuba, blockaded Berlin, eviscerated Poland, and tried to Brezhnev the Chinese.

[Parihaka]

You want to start a Cold War over that?

Hell no, I want Russia to grow a pair and stop pretending they're the worlds biggest victim. Given their current uber-nationalist surge though, I regard a COLD war, much smaller than the old one of course, as the best possible outcome.

[Doktor]

Ukraine is a non-core nation that we were willing to let enter a full economic melt-down. Russia took an ethnically Russia part of said nation almost without firing a shot.
You want to start a Cold War over that?
I don't see the point. Hopefully this is a good wake-up call to the West not to cut its defense spending to slingshots, row boats, and health-care, but this is not the Soviet Union that put missiles in Cuba, blockaded Berlin, eviscerated Poland, and tried to Brezhnev the Chinese.

You would wait them to start doing that again?

[Versus]

For Christ's sake, you all are making an elephant out of a flea. This was all about keeping the Sevastopol and the Black Sea fleet where it is. It is a strategic point that is essential for the Russian national security. Right behind that reason comes another and that is the planned route for the gas pipeline, one is Russian aka the "southern stream" and the other one is one variation of NABUCCO/TAP pipeline that is supposed to draw gas from Caspian basin/Middle East to Europe. Europe took the Northern stream as a mean to leverage US interest so the southern stream must go to anyone else but Russia to leverage their interest. Its called energy independence. Since gas is a strategic resource, controlling the gas supply directly transfers to Europe's energy dependency and thus energy security and yes from that point it is place of conflicting interests and reality. This is not a cold war this is the pipe war and it has nothing to do with ideology or wish to resurrect old empires. Its all about cash and nothing more and nothing less.

But there is a deeper twist in this whole story, that is for sure. Ever since, in June 2005 , the date than only few remember and it was the turning point in human history, the conventional oil production peaked, the scramble began for scraps that were left. First sure fire sign that something was seriously wrong came in 2008 with the market crash and the emergence of global financial crisis. Well, you know what, those two things are connected as umbilical twins. The entire paradigm of the western economy is based on the idea of positivism, aka on the belief that future will be always better than the past and that events are always moving in one direction and never return to their previous stage. Well not quite. This linear perception of world, is an illusion. Things are not linear like it is seen in the west nor they are cyclical like it is seen in the east, yet they move in combination it is a spiral movement as they both go in one direction but in the same time they move in circles. However this was neglected by the western intellectual and philosophical elite as it pushed for linear ideas of progress and positivism. These ideas were accepted by financial sector and based on that paradigm, that tomorrow will always be better than the past, the idea of credit was conceived. Since it is expected that in the future you will have the money to pay for the today's loan. That belief in the future is called trust and the more you believe in the future, the more trust you have and the more trust you have the more credit you can draw. And it worked.

Optimistic and hopeful, western societies were on the path of progress, ever since the industrial revolution and that belief in a linear order of things, became an religion. The magic world of tomorrow, the bright utopian future...with flying cars, space travel and robotic house maids. This love affair with the future was fatal for the East, as it took it too far and jumped over the capitalism and went straight to communism.

I was always amazed how one country can be so idealistic and so out there, to think that it would be possible to skip capitalism and move straight to communism, right from feudalism to wonderful avant-garde of freedom and equality promised by happy bunch of comrades.It always looked to me like a human whom was happy at the age of 7 and that decided overnight to have 20 years on his 8th birthday. But that is the specific super-power of the East, ability to manipulate time....yeah, right.

So in the 20th century we had two, basically utopias fighting for dominance, on the east there was communism and on the west there was free world. And all of them were able to exist only because there was enough energy to support those stances. But no one paid any attention on that item, the sweet crude that gave ability for the F-4 Phantom to fly but also the MiG-21 (please don't start a discussion which one is better, that is not the issue here, from this point of view those two planes are the same since they are both the users of petroleum and its derivatives). The point is that none of those things wouldn't existed if the energy to create them and to operate them was lacking.

So oil and oil usage pushed technological progress and population as well trough mechanized agriculture, quality of life was rising and with it the belief that tomorrow will always be better than yesterday. That directly transferred to money printing press and the cash was in abundance.

But there was a catch.

If you take the base of wealth creation at he beginning of 20th century, the base was industrial growth and manufacturing. That means productive work, creation of new values. The late 19th century and early 20th century key creator of wealth is an industrialist. He might be this and that, he might be cruel and greedy sob, but he makes something, his factory creates something and that something pushes other things in motion (both material and social, mainly new technologies and workers rights). Driven by profit and fighting with competition, this man is constantly engaged in the process. For the most part, he is at the factory with the workers.

After the WW2, the base of wealth creation, slowly moves from manufacturing to banking aka from industrial to service base. The moment when this shift happened, the seeds of destruction were planted into the system "genetic matrix", because from that moment on, the system was divorced from reality and subjected to something that I like to call "an xerox effect". The Xerox effect in essence means, that if you are making copies of something and don't change the toner, each copy will be more pale than the last one, up to the point when you end up with the blank paper. How that translates to this situation? Well if you have an early 20th century industrial baron whom gained its wealth by investing in manufacture and creation of new values, his son inherits that wealth and takes that point as a default point and he continues to enlarge the wealth. But there is a threshold for that. It is not possible to infinitely increase production in order to infinitely increase the wealth, because expenses slowly creep up and take away the profits. So the son of industrial baron, becomes the business man whom is forced to find other sources of profit in order to increase his wealth. His wealth grows so his son, is no longer a business man he is a manager, whom takes this enlarged wealth base as a default value and continues from there. At that point, the manufacture is no longer sufficient to support the lush lifestyle and the wealth creation and it gets replaced by services and ultimately it ends up at the casino aka the Wall Street, since it is the only place where wealth can be increased. The grandson of industrial baron completely abandons the manufacture as a base for wealth creation and accepts service and trading for its creation. Since the base is destroyed aka abandoned, that means that the toner is no longer replaced and every action that the grandson does is an ever more pale copy of his granddad, until one day he loses everything at the stock market and ends up with the blank paper.
If his gran father was calculative, cautious man whom knew risks because he was in constant contact with the wealth creation base, his grand son is a cocaine snoring hedonist empty headed spoiled brat that has an army of managers and consultants that do thinking for him, he is a pale xerox copy of his grand dad. That is the Xerox effect.

Problem is that his inherited wealth made him three times more powerful than the grand dad but also three times less cautious and prone to bad decision making. So from the economic point of view, he is three times more important than the grand dad but also three times more unstable and risky than him. Now multiply the number of sons that are rich and unstable and make an economy out of their wealth and you will end up with an explosive mixture that is highly unstable.

To counter this instability, that creates fear, he becomes the security addict and he constantly seeks positivism aka the linear growth function and voila he finds it in the mainstream media, the CNN the Fox the Forbes, the Financial Times,the Bloomberg... These "oracles" are constant source of goody news and their sole purpose is to keep the grand son happy. Everything is progressive and optimistic. Oh there is fracking, oh there is CNG carrier,oh there is I-pod,I-pad,I-robot oh there is Raptor,there is PAK-FA, novelty after novelty after novelty towards bright world of tomorrow. Grandson has nothing to fear, everything is where it should be and he is safe.

Well, NOT.

The more integrated society becomes, the more brittle and fragile it is simply because the number of "single points of failure" increases with the complexity. All it takes to send the developed world into the stone age is one well placed solar flare and its done. Or the forgotten base, the energy aka the peak oil.
Once it was realized by the banking sector that the bright future will not be that bright, the attempt to salvage the wealth began almost immediate. Credits projected to be paid off in 20 years, are being charged like right now and that lead to Global Financial crisis. The trust in the bright future is shaken and that leads to credit scarcity. In some cases it is shaken completely choking the flow of money and the "wealth creation". Energy that is needed for the wealth creation with which those loans will be repaid doesn't exist and since there is no real value that can cover the "imaginary value" aka the credit, global grabbing is the trend and it will only get worse as we all try to sustain the unsustainable.

We are entering the period of uncertainty only because we are not willing to let go old habits and ways.

[zraver]

Why the Green movement has gained momentum back then?

Money and direction from Moscow

[Dreadnought]

What makes me laugh is the reasons Vlad gave to the press for the seizure. Not one mention of the Naval base nor the pipeline.

He did however mention how many WWII soldiers are buried throughout the land for him to protect and actually gave that as a reason among others.

Funny thing is he seems to leave out that Stalin gave the orders that murdered millions of ethnics including soldiers and scientists after the close of WWII including many of his own. He conviently leaves that part out.

I think what pisses me off is that when supposedly intelligent men in positions of great power such as Vlad seem to "cherry pick" certain points in time, they seem to knowingly forget the disasters that happened in the same decade by their own hand. Its almost as if they are either that stupid or that arrogant to use it as a pressing point for justification for these actions.

IMO, It was very clear what he was after, it has been even before this action was revealed. The dots could have been connected more then two years ago.

[cyppok]

What makes me laugh is the reasons Vlad gave to the press for the seizure. Not one mention of the Naval base nor the pipeline.

He did however mention how many WWII soldiers are buried throughout the land for him to protect and actually gave that as a reason among others.

Funny thing is he seems to leave out that Stalin gave the orders that murdered millions of ethnics including soldiers and scientists after the close of WWII including many of his own. He conviently leaves that part out.

I think what pisses me off is that when supposedly intelligent men in positions of great power such as Vlad seem to "cherry pick" certain points in time, they seem to knowingly forget the disasters that happened in the same decade by their own hand. Its almost as if they are either that stupid or that arrogant to use it as a pressing point for justification for these actions.

IMO, It was very clear what he was after, it has been even before this action was revealed. The dots could have been connected more then two years ago.

your perspective and paradigm of thought is based on a different core of judgements.

did you even listen to his speech? he is not justifying anything
what is has said is basically thus : ukraine = russia they are one and the same, they will intervene if we see fit to do so, ideological contention within and without ukraine ceases to matter from their perspective once ukraine became politically fractured within a step from civil war.

If Russia moves in troops all those people in Kiev will get cleared out and the new guy Lukashenko #2 will make sure to go into western Ukraine and clean it out. That is the jest of what will happen if situation will not normalize within the immediate future. You can heew and haw but that is it. There is about a week or two left. I look at 30th as the time set for lots of financial maturity reasons. All of those Yatsenuks Tehniboks and Klitchkos have not been negotiating with the SouthEastern half at all all they do is make demands and arrest leaders for separatism it does not make it more stable just forces people into the shadows and changes the dynamic to be more radically focused.

10 days left to reality {giving a hint whom does Naftogaz owe money due on the 30th to?}

It is estimated to have more than $10 billion in maturing debt over the coming[this] year, almost equivalent to its central bank's entire usable reserve stash.

This includes the $1.6 billion Naftogaz bond as well as a $1 billion sovereign bond maturing next[this] June.