…is a frightened little girl in a pink ballet tutu, who acts like Obama just wandered in from the rain forest with a bone thru his nose and a communist pamphlet in his loincloth.

– Rosanne Barr

Read on!

Voight responds with a sledgehammer.

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Via The Big Picture

There’s a saying among backpackers - you don’t need to be able to outrun a bear, just to outrun the people you’re with.

PS The scientific name for the grizzly bear is “ursus horribilis”, which gives an important clue as to their nature.

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This brand new political blog already has thoughtful, well-written posts. It often takes new blogs a while to find their voice. However And the cow goes moo seems to have done that early out. Definitely a blog to keep an eye on.

They commented here about our post on An Anarchist View of South Ossetia, then expanded on it (which is how I discovered them.)

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Jetson Green has a comprehensive list. What? You’re not twittering yet?

I’m polizeros on Twitter.

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“In the next few days we will know if Russia wants to be part of the international community or if they don’t give a damn what the worlds thinks of them”, is the stark warning given by 42 year old Georgian artist and writer Nick Gabrichidze, who is also coordinator of SOS Georgia.

This new NGO was set up by members of the Georgian community in Belgium to focus efforts to raise humanitarian aid and to promote Georgian independence by advocacy and campaigning. They are looking for donations and professional volunteers to help those in the improvised refugee camps.

Being based in Brussels they are close to the European institutions but Gabrichidze has found them unimpressive so far. “They’re all on holiday! We’ve had some discussions with the European Commission but we’re waiting for people to come back from their vacation. Throughout this crisis the European Parliament has been on vacation.”

“Although the French have made some initiatives, I haven’t noticed any response from the European Union as a body. The European Parliament hasn’t made any decisions yet, the Commission, in their first meeting, tried to postpone a decision until September. I can tell you the position of individual countries but the position of the European Union is unknown at this time. We’re having better luck with NATO.” Gabrichidze is also dismissive of a peacekeeping role for the EU. “They have no experience. They tried and failed completely in Yugoslavia.”

NATO is seen as a better bet because of their experience and ability to respond to rapidly changing events, while the EU could play a role in reconstruction and humanitarian aid.

Responding to the Georgia crisis is complex because the Russians are notoriously secretive and since the infrastructure has been heavily damaged, finding out the current situation on the ground is difficult. “I don’t know what’s going to happen this evening. Will the Russians withdraw? Will they attack? Nobody knows”.

With the tanks only 20 miles from Tbilisi, no sign of Russian retreat, how would SOS Georgia react if there is no change in the situation or the crisis deepens? “SOS Georgia was mainly set up for humanitarian aid, but if things get worse some people may decide to go and fight on the ground. This would be their own decision and nothing to do with the organisation.”

Gabrichidze admits that there are problems and differences between Georgia and the South Ossetians and Abkhazians, but says there is no hatred between the peoples. He recently attended a meeting with South Ossetians and found they had a lot of common ground. Significantly, he claims some Russians there tried to throw him out. He says that this conflict is not with his fellow countrymen but with Russia. “It was Russian soldiers, who invaded, Russian aircraft that did the bombing.”

When asked about a solution to the crisis Gabrichidze explained that he thought the agreement brokered by France is not a solution but the first step in resolving the conflict. The withdrawal of forces is more difficult for Georgia because of damage to roads and it would be hard to get supplies to refugee camps and there is still looting going on. For the agreement to work, “It’s entirely in Russian hands.”

“If the Russians don’t co-operate with the rest of the world, behaving as they did after the Cold War, then we’re entering another era, one in which Russia does whatever it wants.”

For Gabrichidze the immediate concern is for Russia to honour the agreement it signed. “Russia must withdraw. Not completely, but to show goodwill, they must return to where they were before the conflict.”

What does Gabrichidze think of the current cocktail of Russia threatening Ukraine and Poland and the USA and NATO stretched in Afghanistan and Iraq? Gabrichidze claims they are taking advantage and compares their actions to those of Germany in the 1930s when they annexed or neutralised one state at a time with no serious military opposition. He also predicts that Russia will soon start a propaganda campaign, depicting pro-Georgians as fascists, Islamic terrorists and so on.

The hardliners may be directing the military, but there are tensions within the Russian government as some wish to build on commercial and business relations with the world and see military actions as harmful to Russia’s long term interests.

The coming days will show the world the nature of the Russian bear. Will it be aggressive or can it be tamed? The Georgians will be the first to find out, but what happens in this small republic will affect all of us.

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“I used to think if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the President or the Pope or a .400 baseball hitter, but now I want to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.” — James Carville, advisor to Clinton

The quote is from a Naked Capitalism post titled, Paulson playing chicken with markets: Guess who will win?. It’s about how Treasury Secretary Paulson thought he could bluff the bond markets during the ongoing credit crisis.

From the comments

I have great sympathy for Obama, who will be entering into an office stuffed wall to wall with financial C4.

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The angst and anomie in this hipster howl of despair from Adbusters reaches almost epic proportions.

We are a lost generation, desperately clinging to anything that feels real, but too afraid to become it ourselves. We are a defeated generation, resigned to the hypocrisy of those before us, who once sang songs of rebellion and now sell them back to us. We are the last generation, a culmination of all previous things, destroyed by the vapidity that surrounds us. The hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture so detached and disconnected that it has stopped giving birth to anything new.

Didn’t Allen Ginsberg say the same thing, better and more impassionedly, over 50 years ago in Howl? Well, of course he did.

Hipsters. You didn’t invent being alt-, or jaded, or part of a deliberately separate subculture standing apart from the norm. The punks, hippies, and beats did the same in their day too. So, cheer up. Because, in some ways you’ve already won.

That’s one of the messages in Nation of Rebels. Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture by Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter. Bohemian values, rather than standing apart from the norm have in fact won the culture wars and been adopted by the mainstream, especially advertising. But, and here’s the author’s interesting twist, the counterculture continues to confuse deviance with dissent and thinks by acting alt- that they strike a mighty blow against the empire. Not so. Further, at core, the counterculture is and always has been an engine room of creative, innovative capitalism. (Do I see some hipsters deciding to slash their wrists now?)

From pg. 205 (italics in the original)

Cool people like to see themselves as radicals, subversives who refuse to conform to accepted ways of doing things. And this is exactly what drives capitalism. It is true that genuine creativity is completely rebellious and subversive, since it disrupts everything except capitalism itself.

Their primary point is that the counterculture obsession with being different gets in the way of their genuine desire for social justice and change.

PS I’m not bashing hipsters. Every counterculture needs to sort these things out for themselves.

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Alfredo Jam, head of macro-economic analysis in the economy ministry, told the Financial Times that Cubans had been “overprotected” by a system that subsidised food costs and limited the amount people could earn, prompting labour shortages in important industries.

“We can’t give people so much security with their income that it affects their willingness to work,” Mr Jam said. “We can have equality in access to education and health but not in equality of income.”

The article goes on to say that Cubans enjoy free health care and education, extremely cheap rent, plus subsidized basic foods and that any tinkering with the system would meet heavy resistance from within the ruling Communist party. Yet a deliberate story like this, an interview with the Financial Times, must have been ok’ed from on high in Cuba, probably by Raul Castro himself, and clearly seems to be sending a message.

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