The Morning After.

Conditions: Chang-ey, Hope-y.


Okay, so, yeah, we've turned a corner here. But the road we're on still leads upward, and there's much to be done, on all fronts.



Russia Still Unfairly Defending Herself.

Oddly, Russia has responded to various nations setting up new missile systems near them by setting up a few missile batteries of their own.

Tension between Russia and the West has been heightened by Moscow's plan to deploy new missiles close to Poland.

Both the European Union and NATO have criticised the Russian plan, which President Dmitry Medvedev revealed during his first state of the nation address.

In response to US plans to base part of a missile defence shield in the Czech Republic and Poland, Mr Medvedev said Russia would deploy missiles in its far western enclave of Kaliningrad to neutralise, if necessary, the US system.

- abc.net.au/

I don't get what the problem is. Since the Missile Defense shield has been touted by the Americans as only being for 'evil' countries firing off their missiles, then surely the Russians can make the same claim about their missile system, and everyone will just have to choke down that one too. See, this is who wins in an arms race: the arms. And further undermining the current bad opinion towards Russia are the latest reports that confirm what we've already suspected was the case: they didn't start the war in Georgia after all.

Accounts by European observers monitoring August's Georgia-Russia war have cast doubt on pro-Western Georgian claims that it was attacked first, The New York Times reported.

Members of an international team working for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe conducted two closed-door briefings in August and October to discuss what happened; The Times obtained summaries of both meetings and confirmed the findings with Western diplomats.

Although the newly-reported accounts aren't conclusive, and Georgian leaders have questioned their validity, they appear to show that Georgia's young and relatively inexperienced military attacked the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali on Aug. 7, "exposing civilians, Russian peacekeepers and unarmed monitors to harm." That attack laid the groundwork for Russian aggression.

The brief nine-day war was disastrous for Georgia, and Russian forces occupied the small country for weeks afterward.

- voices.washingtonpost.com/

So, I wonder, is that we are so hard-wired still into the cold war mentality, that we simply cannot accept them doing anything that isn't evil? Are we so blind that anything involving them has to therefore be sinister and threatening? Can we not shake ourselves completely of the old mentality, and judge people and nations by their current actions instead of their past mistakes? OR am I just pissing up a rope here?



Pissing Up Ropes.

Kabul, Afghanistan - An airstrike by United States-led forces killed 40 civilians and wounded 28 others at a wedding party in Kandahar Province in southern Afghanistan, Afghan officials said Wednesday. The casualties included women and children, the officials said.
[...]

It follows an assault in August in western Afghanistan that was initially disputed by the United States, in which an American gunship killed 30 civilians. On Wednesday, at a news conference called to congratulate Mr. Obama, President Hamid Karzai said his first request to Mr. Obama would be "to end the civilian casualties."

The United States military and Afghan authorities were investigating the reports about the latest attack, the American military said in a statement, but it gave no confirmation of the strikes or any death toll.

"The coalition and Afghan authorities are investigating reports of non-combatant casualties in the village of Wech Baghtu," said Cmdr. Jeff Bender, deputy public affairs officer of United States forces in Afghanistan, in a statement.

"If innocent people were killed in this operation, we apologize and express our condolences to the families and the people of Afghanistan," he said, adding that the facts were "unclear at this point."

- www.truthout.org/

Oh, he apologizes, oh that's nice. Well he may be 'unclear' on the facts, but I'm pretty sure I've got them straight. The jarhead idiots screwed up and bombed *another* wedding in their quest to bring peace to Afghanistan by bombing it. Making getting married in Afghanistan about as safe as joining Al Queda. Add that up.

Islamabad, Pakistan - Missiles fired from a remotely-piloted United States aircraft slammed into a village in the North Waziristan region of Pakistan along the Afghan border on Friday and killed between 10 and 13 people, according to a local intelligence official, a Pakistani reporter and two Pakistani television channels.

State television put the death toll at 10 and other news reports said the dead included eight local people and five foreigners. . The deaths were the latest fatalities in a series of American missile attacks that have drawn increasingly irate protests from Pakistan to senior American officials, including the head of the United States Central Command, Gen. David H. Petraeus, and the American ambassador here, Anne Patterson.

The Pakistani president, Asif Ali Zardari, and the prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, both condemned Friday's attack.

- truthout.org/

I can't help but wonder if the kids the American military have to fly those drones actually know that they're killing real people, or if the whole thing is presented to them by their commanding officers as a series of realistic 'training exercises'. I mean, that's assuming there are humans flying these drones at some point, and that the military haven't just automated the whole cursed thing ...already.



Economy Going Down.

And in case you weren't sure, the really is going to be a world-wide recession for 2009.

The IMF predicted that the world’s developed economies would shrink by 0.3 per cent in 2009 and America will decline by 0.7 per cent.

The IMF’s gloomy forecast marks a significant change of heart, coming less than a month after the organisation forecast that the US economy would grow by 0.1 per cent in 2009. On Wall Street, shares sank by 182.39 points to 8,956.88.

- business.timesonline.co.uk/

And...

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Nearly 1.2 million jobs have been lost this year. The unemployment rate is at its highest level since 1994. Retail sales were dismal last month and for automakers, October was the worst month in more than a quarter-century.

But guess what? The United States is still not officially in a recession.

That's because a recession is only defined by a group of academics called the National Bureau of Economic Research.

It's not the media's call. It's not the President's or Congress' call. Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta president Dennis Lockhart said in a speech Friday that the data "indicate" we are in recession, but heck, even Fed chair Ben Bernanke doesn't get to make the call.

According to the NBER's Web site, a recession "is a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real GDP, real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales."

- money.cnn.com/

So, I guess we can still congratulate President Obama on his historic win. But now we all get to watch him ascend to the hire wire, now with more height and a few lions, alligators and bitter republicans thrown into the tank that waits below. I wonder if his security contingent are there to keep him from escaping as much as they're there to keep him safe?


- Peace out.