yurism

08:19 pm: 'Last Ottoman' dies in Istanbul

Ertugrul Osman - the would-be sultan known in Turkey as the "last Ottoman" - has died in Istanbul at the age of 97.

Osman would have been sultan of the Ottoman Empire had Turkey's modern republic not been created in the 1920s.

As the last surviving grandson of Sultan Abdul-Hamid II, he would have been known as his Imperial Highness Prince Shehzade Ertugrul Osman Effendi.

Born in Istanbul in 1912, Osman spent most of his years living modestly in New York.

 

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07:52 pm: Reagan Did It

By PAUL KRUGMAN (The NY Times)

 

“This bill is the most important legislation for financial institutions in the last 50 years. It provides a long-term solution for troubled thrift institutions. ... All in all, I think we hit the jackpot.” So declared Ronald Reagan in 1982, as he signed the Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act.

He was, as it happened, wrong about solving the problems of the thrifts. On the contrary, the bill turned the modest-sized troubles of savings-and-loan institutions into an utter catastrophe. But he was right about the legislation’s significance. And as for that jackpot — well, it finally came more than 25 years later, in the form of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

For the more one looks into the origins of the current disaster, the clearer it becomes that the key wrong turn — the turn that made crisis inevitable — took place in the early 1980s, during the Reagan years.

 

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11:02 pm: To Russia, With Hate

 

Cato Institute targets the Russkies

by Justin Raimondo

In Afghanistan, Pakistan, and throughout the Middle East [.pdf], America's name is mud, thanks to the Bush administration and its predecessors. During the Bush era, our international standing took a huge hit, with millions wondering what crazed act of aggression was going to come out of Washington next. Our militaristic foreign policy [.pdf] has alienated our friends while multiplying and emboldening our enemies.

To listen to Andrei Illarionov tell it, however, we don't have enough enemies. One more needs to be added to the list, and that is Russia.

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10:48 am: Who will save Israel from itself?
By Mark LeVin

One by one the justifications given by Israel for its latest war in Gaza are unravelling.

The argument that this is a purely defensive war, launched only after Hamas broke a six-month ceasefire has been challenged, not just by observers in the know such as Jimmy Carter, the former US president who helped facilitate the truce, but by centre-right Israeli intelligence think tanks.

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10:43 am: A New Era for Russian-Western Relations?
Courting the Bear

By ERIC WALBERG

Tthe meeting underlined improved relations. The European trade commissioner, Catherine Ashton, said talk had been “robust, but very open. Presidents Sarkozy, Barroso and Medvedev were very direct with each other in the spirit of having a dialogue.” European Commission President José Manuel Barroso, using rather “robust” diplomatic language, ridiculed the Russian threat to station missiles in Kaliningrad, made just hours after Obama had won the US presidential election last week: “If we start with the idea that there are missiles on one side or the other, we come back to the Cold War rhetoric which is, I would even say, stupid.”

 

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10:38 pm: The Russian Question

What's Obama's answer?  by Justin Raimondo The Obama-oids aren't talking too much about foreign policy these days, although that was their candidate's ticket to the White House. Iraq was the winning issue that gave Obama's primary campaign the oomph it needed to oust the putative front-runner from her perch as the anointed one, but it fails to evoke the interest it once did on account of the rapid deterioration of the economy. It doesn't matter that the costs of the Iraq and Afghan wars amount to at least three more bank bailouts – and you can throw in what's left of the American auto industry for good measure.   ( Read more... )

10:59 am: Georgia: The Score
by Srdja Trifkovic

Russia’s recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia makes it imperative to analyze the situation in the Caucasus dispassionately and comprehensively. The mainstream media (MSM) treatment of the crisis has been predictably monolithic, however – almost as biased (“bad Russia!”) as it was shallow. A more nuanced story does exist, but it is not readily available. We bring you a few samples of the commentary and analysis that you will not find in your Gannett paper or on your prime-time news channel.

 

12:34 pm: Bosnia, Hysteria Politics, and the Roots of International Terrorism
by Brendan O'Neil

Since he was arrested in Belgrade last week, there have been miles and miles of newspaper commentary on Radovan Karadzic: on his bloody past; his role in Srebrenica; his bouffant; his limp handshake; his transformation from war leader to bearded hippy therapist. Yet perhaps the most interesting article – or at least the most unwittingly revealing – was a 374-word piece that appeared on the website of the UK Guardian on 25 July.

 

01:48 pm: How Britain Wages War

by John Pilger

The military has created a wall of silence around its frequent resort to barbaric practices, including torture, and goes out of its way to avoid legal scrutiny.   ( Read more... )

07:17 pm: Les Russes piètres chanteurs mais rois du plongeon

10:55 am: Астрономы "причалили" Одиссея домой
http://www.lenta.ru/articles/2008/06/24/ithaka/

01:04 am: Obama is a truly Democratic expansionist

by John Pilger for New Statesman

Truly exciting and historic moments have been fabricated around US presidential campaigns for as long as I can recall, generating bullshit on a grand scale

In 1941, the editor Edward Dowling wrote: "The two greatest obstacles to democracy in the United States are, first, the widespread delusion among the poor that we have a democracy, and second, the chronic terror among the rich, lest we get it." What has changed? The terror of the rich is greater than ever, and the poor have passed on their delusion to those who believe that when George W Bush finally steps down next January, his numerous threats to the rest of humanity will diminish.

 

 

11:55 am: Risky Geopolitical Game: Washington Plays ‘Tibet Roulette’ with China
By F. William Engdahl

Global Research, April 10, 2008

Washington has obviously decided on an ultra-high risk geopolitical game with Beijing’s by fanning the flames of violence in Tibet just at this sensitive time in their relations and on the run-up to the Beijing Olympics. It’s part of an escalating strategy of destabilization of China which has been initiated by the Bush Administration over the past months. It also includes the attempt to ignite an anti-China Saffron Revolution in the neighboring Myanmar region, bringing US-led NATO troops into Darfur where China’s oil companies are developing potentially huge oil reserves. It includes counter moves across mineral-rich Africa. And it includes strenuous efforts to turn India into a major new US forward base on the Asian sub-continent to be deployed against China, though evidence to date suggests the Indian government is being very cautious not to upset Chinese relations.

07:28 pm: Georgia: The Bloom Is Off the Rose
Another 'colored revolution' fades to black

by Justin Raimondo

While Pakistan is getting all the attention as the latest US-supported dictatorship to implode, another and even more telling example is President Mikhail Saakashvili's recent clampdown in the former Soviet republic of Georgia. While the regime of Gen. Pervez Musharraf is not a US creation – the General launched a coup all on his own, with official US disapproval – Georgia, you'll remember, was the site of the 2003 "Rose Revolution," one of a series of US-backed -and-funded "color revolutions" and the one often pointed to as a model for future "pro-democracy" campaigns in the former Soviet Union.

 

09:32 pm: War and "Peak Oil"
Confessions of an ‘ex’ Peak Oil believer

By F. William Engdahl
 
Global Research, September 26, 2007

The good news is that panic scenarios about the world running out of oil anytime soon are wrong. The bad news is that the price of oil is going to continue to rise. Peak Oil is not our problem. Politics is. Big Oil wants to sustain high oil prices. Dick Cheney and friends are all too willing to assist.

On a personal note, I’ve researched questions of petroleum, since the first oil shocks of the 1970’s. I was intrigued in 2003 with something called Peak Oil theory. It seemed to explain the otherwise inexplicable decision by Washington to risk all in a military move on Iraq.

Peak Oil advocates, led by former BP geologist Colin Campbell, and Texas banker Matt Simmons, argued that the world faced a new crisis, an end to cheap oil, or Absolute Peak Oil, perhaps by 2012, perhaps by 2007. Oil was supposedly on its last drops. They pointed to our soaring gasoline and oil prices, to the declines in output of North Sea and Alaska and other fields as proof they were right.

According to Campbell, the fact that no new North Sea-size fields had been discovered since the North Sea in the late 1960’s was proof. He reportedly managed to convince the International Energy Agency and the Swedish government. That, however, does not prove him correct.

Intellectual fossils?

The Peak Oil school rests its theory on conventional Western geology textbooks, most by American or British geologists, which claim oil is a ‘fossil fuel,’ a biological residue or detritus of either fossilized dinosaur remains or perhaps algae, hence a product in finite supply. Biological origin is central to Peak Oil theory, used to explain why oil is only found in certain parts of the world where it was geologically trapped millions of years ago. That would mean that, say, dead dinosaur remains became compressed and over tens of millions of years fossilized and trapped in underground reservoirs perhaps 4-6,000 feet below the surface of the earth. In rare cases, so goes the theory, huge amounts of biological matter should have been trapped in rock formations in the shallower ocean offshore as in the Gulf of Mexico or North Sea or Gulf of Guinea. Geology should be only about figuring out where these pockets in the layers of the earth, called reservoirs, lie within certain sedimentary basins.

An entirely alternative theory of oil formation has existed since the early 1950’s in Russia, almost unknown to the West. It claims conventional American biological origins theory is an unscientific absurdity that is un-provable. They point to the fact that western geologists have repeatedly predicted finite oil over the past century, only to then find more, lots more.

Not only has this alternative explanation of the origins of oil and gas existed in theory. The emergence of Russia and prior of the USSR as the world’s largest oil producer and natural gas producer has been based on the application of the theory in practice. This has geopolitical consequences of staggering magnitude.

11:25 pm: Bush's brand-new poodle
By Pepe Escobar

He was impregnably armored by his good intentions and his ignorance. - Graham Greene, The Quiet American

PARIS - With former British prime minister Tony Blair out of the picture, there's now a newer, leaner, meaner, adrenaline-packed "Made in France" version. Thanks to his unrelenting support for President George W Bush's war on Iraq, Blair used to be derided in all corners of the globe as Bush's poodle. Now the new self-appointed lap dog is French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

09:36 pm: Looting Kosovo
By Carlton Meyer

Most Americans are quick to blame President George Bush for America's imperial ambitions in the post-Cold War world.  They assume that electing a Democrat President will return the USA to its traditional role as leader of the world, not ruler of the world.  However, Americans should recall that a Democrat administration under President Clinton had already begun expanding the empire.  They organized an unprovoked attack on Serbia until it ceded control of its southern province of Kosovo.  As soon as U.S. troops arrived, they began to build large, permanent military bases while Serbian government property was looted.  This was an effective demonstration of American power, yet it may soon devolve into a disaster.

 

 

09:19 pm: Cats are our oldest friends
By Roger Highfield

The dog is usually thought of as man's best friend.

But a genetic study published today suggests that cats may actually have been a more constant companion of humans over the millennia.

Ancestors of domestic cats are now believed to have started living alongside humans any time from about 10,000 to 130,000 years ago. In the case of dogs, an earlier DNA study showed that they originated from east Asian wolves a mere 15,000 years ago.

The new DNA evidence shows that cats around the world can trace their origins to the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, which stretches from the eastern Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf, revealing how at least five female ancestors from the region gave rise to all the domestic cats alive today.

The "ubermoggy" - the ancestor of these founding felines - was a wildcat of the species F.s. libyca, which lives on today in the remote deserts of the Middle East.

 

05:43 pm: It’s Official: The Crash of the U.S. Economy has begun
by Richard C. Cook

It’s official. Mark your calendars. The crash of the U.S. economy has begun. It was announced the morning of Wednesday, June 13, 2007, by economic writers Steven Pearlstein and Robert Samuelson in the pages of the Washington Post, one of the foremost house organs of the U.S. monetary elite.

Pearlstein’s column was titled, “The Takeover Boom, About to Go Bust” and concerned the extraordinary amount of debt vs. operating profits of companies currently subject to leveraged buyouts.

In language remarkably alarmist for the usually ultra-bland pages of the Post, Pearlstein wrote, “It is impossible to predict when the magic moment will be reached and everyone finally realizes that the prices being paid for these companies, and the debt taken on to support the acquisitions, are unsustainable. When that happens, it won't be pretty. Across the board, stock prices and company valuations will fall. Banks will announce painful write-offs, some hedge funds will close their doors, and private-equity funds will report disappointing returns. Some companies will be forced into bankruptcy or restructuring.”

Further, “Falling stock prices will cause companies to reduce their hiring and capital spending while governments will be forced to raise taxes or reduce services, as revenue from capital gains taxes declines. And the combination of reduced wealth and higher interest rates will finally cause consumers to pull back on their debt-financed consumption. It happened after the junk-bond and savings-and-loan collapses of the late 1980s. It happened after the tech and telecom bust of the late '90s. And it will happen this time.”


http://www.atlanticfreepress.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1804&Itemid=81

11:24 pm: Iran, Russia and Debt
By Andrea Crandall

Historians are quick to recognize struggles between national powers, but they usually neglect the power of organized international finance; which has aims above and beyond those of its host countries. In fact, during the Belle Époque, “superpowers” like Britain and France were simply the work-horses of the financial elite.

At the end of the 19th century Russia was on the outside of the international banking system looking in. This made it both a threat and a tempting conquest for the financiers. The Tsarist government recognized the nature of this threat and put up resistance to financial power: their efforts were not successful. Russia's weakness was its need for capital — and this weakness was expertly manipulated.

Iran was one stage for this manipulation, but the ultimate prize was controlling Russia itself.

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http://www.sandersresearch.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1252