8 december 2011. Carl Bildt på väg till NATO-konferens om Afghanistan och till följande konferens om nätfrihet. Idag 20 år sedan Belavezha-avtalen om Sovjetunionens upplösning. Assyrisk kommentar till bliogginlägget om oljan i Nineveslätten.
"Here is a list of the most important coming non-events that we have been loudly debating and analyzing: Israel is not going to bomb Iran. The euro is not going to disappear. Outside powers are not going to engage in military action inside Syria. The upsurge of worldwide popular unrest is not going to fade away." Meanwhile, to minimal serious coverage in the media and on the internet, the Nord Stream was inaugurated in Lubmin on Germany’s Baltic Coast on Nov. 8 in the presence of Pres. Medvedev of Russia and the prime ministers of Germany, France, and the Netherlands, plus the director of Gazprom, Russia’s gas exporter, and the European Union’s Energy Commissioner. This is a geopolitical game-changer, unlike all the widely discussed non-events that are not going to happen.
"Everything is dying," a woman said as the town hall meeting was finally coming to a close. "How can you honestly tell us that our Gulf is resilient and will bounce back? Because not one of you up here has a hint as to what is going to happen to our Gulf.
Counter Punch, September 9, 2009. "Richard W. Behan lives and writes on Lopez Island, off the northwest coast of Washington state. He has published on various websites over two dozen articles exposing and criticizing the criminal wars of the Bush Administ
edited by Charles Ganske and authored by Yuri Mamchur, a Russian national, serves as Director of Discovery Institute's Real Russia Project, founded 2005.
Tyler Durden on 07/28/2014 As The FT reports confirming our earlier comments: The award is a landmark not just for its size – 20 times the previous record for an arbitration ruling. The tribunal also found definitively that Russia’s pursuit of Yukos and its independently-minded main shareholder, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a decade ago was politically motivated. ... Though Russia cannot appeal against the award, Moscow said it would pursue all legal avenues for trying to get it “set aside”. Even if the ruling stands, shareholders face a tortuous battle trying to enforce it. If Moscow refuses to pay, they must pursue Russian sovereign commercial assets in the 150 countries that are party to the so-called 1958 New York Convention on enforcing arbitration awards. But perhaps this explains why Putin is not coming out swinging, as The FT concludes, One person close to Mr Putin said the Yukos ruling was insignificant in light of the bigger geopolitical stand-off over Ukraine. “There is a war coming in Europe,” he said. “Do you really think this matters?”
"The most important question facing the human race is how we respond to the interconnected crises of Peak Oil, climate change, overpopulation, and other resource conflicts. How we use the remaining oil determines the future of the human race:..."
Shale Gas and its Implications reviews estimates that have been made for shale gas deposits in Algeria, Libya, Tunisia, Morocco, Mauritania, South Africa and the Western Sahara and highlights the challenges to their development. In a foreword to the report, AfDB President Donald Kaberuka, affirms the Bank’s willingness to support these and any other member countries and sub-regions that have shale gas prospects
Canadian authorities on Thursday sent armed paramilitaries wearing camouflage and carrying high-powered rifles to clear out a group of anti-fracking protesters who’ve blockaded a gas exploration site since Sept. 30, area media reported.
Interview by Hugo Prieto in Contrapunto.com
12 October 2015
Article
Edgardo Lander argues that Venezuela’s once-hopeful revolution is coming to an end, because it failed to overcome the Leninist logic of verticality as well as the model of the rentier state.
"Electoral calculations eliminate all possibility of transformation, of going beyond, of imagining a different country, because the starting point is what already exists. In this sense, electoral competition has an extraordinarily conservative effect on political systems, reaffirming ‘common sense’; whoever goes beyond these limits will have big problems."
"Neither in political debates nor in government programmes is there an acknowledgment of where we are. The two party political forces differ in absolutely everything, except for one small detail: both offer (at least when Chávez was last elected) an oil production of six million barrels a day by the end of this constitutional period. They disagree on everything else except the idea of strengthening the oil rentier-state model. But this is precisely what needs to be discussed. The problem is that there is a nation-wide rentier-state consensus. "