Syria - Russia - US

[RE]

Yes, we are all tired of western imperialism and hypocrisy, no one feels sorry for the west. We can all agree on that. But fighting it out in a foreign country, dropping bombs on civilians all over the Middle East, will not solve anything (except for the population problem but in a very violent way).   

Even if Syria is degraded by ecosystem overuse that is no reason for bombing the country. Also there are ways to restore degraded soils, something that is now tried in Lebanon (http://ecoplantmed.eu/). So investing, sharing knowledge and resources, with locals on the ground regarding large-scale ecosystem restoration could make parts of the country livable again, but that would require and end to the fighting and supply of weaponry. Shouldnt we try to help people be able to live in the Middle East instead of forcing them to flee into other countries or trying to build walls to keep them out? I dont know what is realistic or not at this point, everything is so messed up, but surely there must be smarter ways of handling the situation that bombing the entire region (which the US is famous for doing)?

I doubt you could do much normal agicultural restoration unless the drought ended, though you might have ennough to try some hydroponics.  I'm not sure there's even enough water though for drinking water for that population size.

Far as the bomb dropping goes, that's the outcome from a society in breakdown spawning many different factions and the internal violence starts to spread across borders.  The big powers then drop in with more weapons supporting one faction or another as a proxy to try and get control of the situation.  When this doesn't do the trick, then they bring on the Air Support.

Far as Mother Russia is concerned, they don't want the ground violence crossing over their southern border, so Vlad the Impaler is trying to contain it to Syria.  Turkey is overwhelmed with refugees itself, and factionalization and civil war is likely there any day.

Why do these places break down in this way?  Well, besides the climate and overpopulation problem, Economics and Energy.  When these countries had oil to export, they were able to get copius money from the Western banks based on their oil reserves to run their country.  Once they don't have exportable oil, the money flow stops.

Western Imperialist policy has always been about trying to access the available energy in MENA.  The goal at the moment is to try and keep what is left flowing out of Saudi Arabia and Iran.  If they can keep the violence contained to Syria, this will last a bit longer.  Inevitably though, it will metastcize and then the oil flow stops.

When that occurs, the societies currently still running will begin to factionalize as well, and the civil wars will come to Europe and jump the pond to the FSoA as well.

Eventually the fuel to put the bombers up in the air will run out, and then the fighting will be all mano a mano on the ground with guns until the supply of bullets runs out.  Then it will be done with Trebuchets and Atl-Atls until the population drops sufficently for the land it is located on to support that population, with quite a bit of undershoot likely there.

The only question here is one of timelines, how long it will take to play out.  WAG  from me is 10-20 years.

RE

• Tweet

[Fenixor]

Okey, yes I see all of your points, and yes I do like this community of people who dare talk about every single topic even if it's not pc (which is a huge problem in Sweden where we only have "feel good" debates about nothing). And yes, I get very frustrated with corporate media both here in Sweden, the UK, US and elsewhere. Tried sending in articles (about oil-food link problem) for the opinion pages in the two largest newspapers but got rejected, instead they went for famous names (politicians or actors) with inconsequential topics like I regard it more like an entertainment industry, its not about news at all.

Yes, I understand the energy and food dynamics of population overshoot, I guess...its difficult to accept that millions and then billions of people will die, no matter what, since I have to live through it. Dennis meadows and Graham Turner says collapse will start about now 2015-2020, oil supply will fall, then food and finally population (from 2030 perhaps). If Bardi is right, with his seneca cliff, it could happen much quicker. I will keep focusing my attention on saving animals and plants since it seems like we cant save humans. 

• Tweet

[RE]

Okey, yes I see all of your points, and yes I do like this community of people who dare talk about every single topic even if it's not pc (which is a huge problem in Sweden where we only have "feel good" debates about nothing). And yes, I get very frustrated with corporate media both here in Sweden, the UK, US and elsewhere. Tried sending in articles (about oil-food link problem) for the opinion pages in the two largest newspapers but got rejected, instead they went for famous names (politicians or actors) with inconsequential topics like I regard it more like an entertainment industry, its not about news at all.

Yes, I understand the energy and food dynamics of population overshoot, I guess...its difficult to accept that millions and then billions of people will die, no matter what, since I have to live through it. Dennis meadows and Graham Turner says collapse will start about now 2015-2020, oil supply will fall, then food and finally population (from 2030 perhaps). If Bardi is right, with his seneca cliff, it could happen much quicker. I will keep focusing my attention on saving animals and plants since it seems like we cant save humans.

Feel free to send me your articles, I'll publish them on the Diner. 

Far as when collapse will "begin", it began quite some time back, the question is when will things accelerate and go out of control in your own neighborhood?  Since Norway still has some oil and Sweden has decent hydro power, I suspect Scandinavia willl do OK for a while.

Dwelling on questions of Doom isn't for everyone.  It can obviously get depressing, but it is also fascinating.  Being around to watch a civilization and way of life come apart at the seams doesn't happen very often, it gives you a lot of food for thought.

RE

• Tweet

[RE]

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/10/07/russia-ramps-up-wwiii-talking-points.html

Russia Ramps Up WWIII Talk

• Tweet

[Palloy]

All the sources for that article, "Echo of Moscow", Vladimir Ryzhkov and Yulia Latynina are associated with anti-Putin critic Alexey Navalny, and the whole lot are tied in with NED and World Movement for Democracy, all funded out of Washington.  If Washington wants some dirt thrown at Putin, they get Echo to print it and Beast to spread it.

While it is true that "Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Russia's bombing campaign in Syria was a “grave mistake,” that Putin’s strategy was unacceptable for Turkey", you have to realise that that was at a NATO meeting, while his Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu was saying:

http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/turkey-urges-russia-not-to-escalate-tension-in-syria-.aspx?pageID=517&nID=89408&NewsCatID=510

Davutoğlu said Turkey had warned Russia to prevent a repetition of such violations, stressing that Russian authorities had assured Turkey that they would not be repeated and that the Oct. 3 violation was unintentional.

“I just spoke with our chief of General Staff. We have given necessary instructions to our foreign minister. Diplomatic traffic has begun. Our position is very clear, we’ll warn any country that violates our borders in a friendly way. Russia is our friend and neighbor. There is no tension between Turkey and Russia in this sense. The issue of Syria is not a Turkish-Russian crisis,” he said.

• Tweet

[Palloy]

https://www.rt.com/news/317864-russian-warships-missiles-launch/
4 Russian warships launch 26 missiles against ISIS from Caspian Sea
7 Oct, 2015



“Four missile ships launched 26 cruise missiles at 11 targets. According to objective control data, all the targets were destroyed. No civilian objects sustained damage,” Shoigu said.

The missiles flew some 1,500 km before reaching their targets, proving their efficiency.

The missile attacks came from Russia’s fleet in the Caspian Sea, which borders Russia, Iran and three other littoral countries. The precision weapons hit all intended targets. The attacks required cooperation from Iran and Iraq, as the missiles had to travel through their airspace to reach Syria.

The Russian Defense Ministry said it had worked with its partners to plan the flight path so that the missiles traveled only over desolate areas and didn’t pose any danger to civilians.

Four warships of the Caspian fleet were involved in the missile attacks, the Gepard-class frigate Dagestan and the Buyan-M-class corvettes Grad Sviyazhsk, Uglich and Veliky Ustyug. They fired cruise missiles from the Kalibr NK (Klub) VLS launchers. The missiles used are capable of hitting a target within 3 meters at a range of up to 2,500 km.

Earlier, Russian warships played a key part in deploying the Russian warplanes to Syria, delivering equipment and supplies to an air base near Latakia and the Navy’s old base in Tartus.

Russia has spent a week delivering airstrikes at terrorist forces in Syria, conducting over 120 combat sorties. Now the Navy is joining Russia’s Air Force in the operation.

• Tweet

[Petty Tyrant]

So what you are saying is that you trust news sources such as RT (that we know is a state sponsored media outlet), which you posted from before, but not crowdsourced investigative journalists from the UK simply because they are from the west?

This failed logic is typical of the "american left", when all anti-west sentiment instead leads to taking russian news at face value. The point is that both the US (west) and Russia is engaged in an extensive disinformation (propaganda) war and that instead of simply "cheering for Putin" which many do here on the Diner and at Zero Hedge etc. one should think hard and long about the fact that ANY BOMBINGS no matter by whom is ultimately not helpful to the Syrian people. Steve Ludlum explained it nicely in his latest post (http://www.economic-undertow.com/).

I can handle wacky conspiracies but this myth that "all Russia does is good, and all the west does is bad" is so wrong and dangerous that my credibility for this website now dropped several points.

Hello Fenixor,

one persons post does not always represent a consensus opinion. Few people have time to point out all the relative merits of every article or personal opinion put up. Especially so if one or more people have already had the same discussion several times in the past. When palloy makes seemingly pro russian points such as that there are msm accusations of russian assistance to east ukraine but no proof,  it doesnt mean he is so credulous to believe east ukraine could wage war against the countries army without the help of russia,  just that there is no proof given.

• Tweet

[Palloy]

Fenixor: So what you are saying is that you trust news sources such as RT (that we know is a state sponsored media outlet), which you posted from before, but not crowdsourced investigative journalists from the UK simply because they are from the west?

This failed logic is typical of the "american left", when all anti-west sentiment instead leads to taking russian news at face value. The point is that both the US (west) and Russia is engaged in an extensive disinformation (propaganda) war and that instead of simply "cheering for Putin" which many do here on the Diner and at Zero Hedge etc. one should think hard and long about the fact that ANY BOMBINGS no matter by whom is ultimately not helpful to the Syrian people.

No, I don't trust any of them, except when they quote their own leaders saying "blah blah blah" I trust that that really was said.  I certainly don't trust a crowd-sourced individual working from home in the UK, who only takes Russia and Syria to task, never the US/UK.  Crowd-sourced means anonymously funded, and when the result shows pro-US bias, I suspect US funding.

I post articles all the time from RT, because that is the easiest way to get "the other point of view" to the MSM, which we are deluged with all the time.

"american left" - hardly, in the US I would be branded an extremist ultra-leftist Trotskyite, and dragged off to some black site immediately.

"ANY BOMBINGS no matter by whom is ultimately not helpful to the Syrian people." - agreed, I said as much just yesterday on the thread about Ron Paul.  But my opinions are so far from what the world is like in practice, that they don't matter - I worked that out after a long period of idealistic political work which amounted to nought. 

Geopolitics works very much like it is described in "The Grand Chessboard" by Brzezinsky, who is an evil piece of shit.  It was his strategy of using Islamic proxies to counter Soviet atheism that got the whole Afghanistan-Iran-Iraq thing going, and despite all the blowback it has caused, he still thinks it will work to win the central Asian -stans over the West, and prize Chechnya and Dagestan off Russia, and Ouigur-stan off China.

• Tweet

[jdwheeler42]

Yes, I understand the energy and food dynamics of population overshoot, I guess...its difficult to accept that millions and then billions of people will die, no matter what, since I have to live through it. Dennis meadows and Graham Turner says collapse will start about now 2015-2020, oil supply will fall, then food and finally population (from 2030 perhaps). If Bardi is right, with his seneca cliff, it could happen much quicker. I will keep focusing my attention on saving animals and plants since it seems like we cant save humans.

Feel free to send me your articles, I'll publish them on the Diner. 

Far as when collapse will "begin", it began quite some time back, the question is when will things accelerate and go out of control in your own neighborhood?  Since Norway still has some oil and Sweden has decent hydro power, I suspect Scandinavia willl do OK for a while.

Dwelling on questions of Doom isn't for everyone.  It can obviously get depressing, but it is also fascinating.  Being around to watch a civilization and way of life come apart at the seams doesn't happen very often, it gives you a lot of food for thought.

Latest I've heard this is the 25th time in human history a civilization has come apart.  Not only is it exciting for it's relative infrequency, but the rise of civilizations tends to follow a pattern, as does the collapse, that has its own internal logic, regardless of individual action.  But the result after the collapse, that seems to be very chaotic and very much dependent on individual initiative.  Imagine how different medieval Europe would have been without the monasteries started by Saint Patrick.

If plants and animals are your thing, Fenixor, by all means, do your best to save them.  Centuries from now, species may be back from the brink of extinction due to your efforts.  It's already happened once a century ago with the American bison.

• Tweet

[Fenixor]

Wow, lots of responses. Thanks for the warm welcome 

Uncle Bob: you are correct, guess I got a bit frustrated, did not intend to generalize  that way

Palloy: Yes, we agree that none of them is very trustworthy. I have been wondering if this whole thing (intervention and war propaganda) is not simply a way for the US and Russia to give their domestic audience something else to focus on while their own countries fall apart.

RE: yes collapse have begun, but have to some degree been postponed (obscured) in some regions of the world by money printing and other trickery. Think it is more obvious in the US than over here in Scandinavia. Yes we do have plenty of electricity but we rely on oil and food imports, just wrote a post about it on my blog (http://peakresources.blogspot.se/2015/10/oil-supply-shock-food-shortages-and.html). Because people have been able to afford to buy oil still, because of massive loans, the real effects have not been felt here yet.

jdwheeler42: Yes civilisations have collapsed before but not on a global scale, people tend to forget that we have degraded the biosphere to such a large extent (50% of all biomass used up) that many species wont be able to survive or recover. And since humans dont really care about other species they are likely to degrade even more of the carrying capacity on their way down. Therefore and because I am a trained ecologist it feels more important to safeguard the ecological underpinnings of all life, rather than focus on saving humans. Its not a very pc view, most people dont understand why I dont want kids or why Im planting meadows for pollinators. So be it, perhaps with time they will come to understand.

• Tweet

[RE]

RE: yes collapse have begun, but have to some degree been postponed (obscured) in some regions of the world by money printing and other trickery. Think it is more obvious in the US than over here in Scandinavia. Yes we do have plenty of electricity but we rely on oil and food imports, just wrote a post about it on my blog (http://peakresources.blogspot.se/2015/10/oil-supply-shock-food-shortages-and.html). Because people have been able to afford to buy oil still, because of massive loans, the real effects have not been felt here yet.

Didn't realize you had your own blog FX!  I will cross post this to the Diner blog, and make you a Byline as well! 

Would you like to get together for a podcast or vidcast?

RE

• Tweet

[RE]

RE: yes collapse have begun, but have to some degree been postponed (obscured) in some regions of the world by money printing and other trickery. Think it is more obvious in the US than over here in Scandinavia. Yes we do have plenty of electricity but we rely on oil and food imports, just wrote a post about it on my blog (http://peakresources.blogspot.se/2015/10/oil-supply-shock-food-shortages-and.html). Because people have been able to afford to buy oil still, because of massive loans, the real effects have not been felt here yet.

Didn't realize you had your own blog FX!  I will cross post this to the Diner blog, and make you a Byline as well! 

Would you like to get together for a podcast or vidcast?

RE

I plugged your article on r/globalcollapse. 

RE

• Tweet

[RE]

RE: yes collapse have begun, but have to some degree been postponed (obscured) in some regions of the world by money printing and other trickery. Think it is more obvious in the US than over here in Scandinavia. Yes we do have plenty of electricity but we rely on oil and food imports, just wrote a post about it on my blog (http://peakresources.blogspot.se/2015/10/oil-supply-shock-food-shortages-and.html). Because people have been able to afford to buy oil still, because of massive loans, the real effects have not been felt here yet.

Didn't realize you had your own blog FX!  I will cross post this to the Diner blog, and make you a Byline as well! 

Would you like to get together for a podcast or vidcast?

RE

I plugged your article on r/globalcollapse. 

RE

Now also plugged on r/sweden.   

Do you have a version in Swedish?  r/sweden is mostly in Swedish.  You might get more hits with a Swedish version.

RE

• Tweet

[Fenixor]

RE: Thanks for the plug! Dont have lots of traffic on my websites, dont like promoting myself (its a Swedish thing). No but I have another blog in Swedish (http://klimatanpassa.blogspot.se/), not the same posts and relatively new, since most Swedes know english. Sure, I could do a pod/vidcast but Im not a seasoned doomer like most of your ordinary guests.

• Tweet

[RE]

RE: Thanks for the plug! Dont have lots of traffic on my websites, dont like promoting myself (its a Swedish thing). No but I have another blog in Swedish (http://klimatanpassa.blogspot.se/), not the same posts and relatively new, since most Swedes know english. Sure, I could do a pod/vidcast but Im not a seasoned doomer like most of your ordinary guests.

Well, no problem for me Promoting.  I'm an AMERIKAN, not a Swede, and Promotion is what I was raised to do.  I am the KING of PLUGGING on the net!  HTF do you think I got the Diner ranked higher than OFW, Orlov and Greer?  LOL.  Do you want traffic or not?  You want people reading the shit your write or not?  If people are not reading it, you are pissing in the wind, which is even tougher for females than males.  LOL

I am working on my November Vidcast.  Last one was UK centered, this one would be Pan-European.  I'll get Ugo from the south in Italy, Monsta & Jason from the UK and you from Sweden.  That is a very nice demographic spread besides everything else! 

We should probably talk first privately.  Send me your Skype ID in a PM.

RE

• Tweet