The New American Cold War

Have been rather busy for the last couple of months. But thanks for keeping this place running:) I was thinking of trying to specialise this blog a bit. The idea being that I try to find articles about Russia. Anyway, here is the first one. I only managed to get about three quarters of the way through it - have to go, I am already late. But it's a good one.

Here is a nice quote from the first page

[The Nation: June 21, 2006 ]

More fundamental realities indicate that Russia remains in an unprecedented state of peacetime demodernization and depopulation. Investment in the economy and other basic infrastructures remains barely a third of the 1990 level. Some two-thirds of Russians still live below or very near the poverty line, including 80 percent of families with two or more children, 60 percent of rural citizens and large segments of the educated and professional classes, among them teachers, doctors and military officers.

The important bit here for me is not about the poverty line or that Russian intellectuals live in such sorry conditions (as opposed to their compatriots who moved to Germany, Israel and US a decade ago and have now managed to make a good life for themselves.) The most damning sentence here is the one about the investment in intrastructure - a third of the 1990 level!!

If that's true, then it's even worse than I suspected. Without proper modern infrastructure you can't really function in the global economy. Things are dragging along now because of massive fossil fuel exports, but even here there is very little investment into exploration of new fields etc. (Can't remember where I read that one)

this week in london

This week London's Metropolitan Police force decided to shoot more innocent people.

Just in case last year's execution of Jean Charles De Menezes wasn't proof enough that the Met's chiefs are incompetent, their policy of 'shoot-first, think-later' seems to have found them wanting again.

Also, why is their PR soooo bad... you'd think as a police force for one of the biggest cities in the world they'd have loads of good excuses prepared for such scenarios, but all they can come up with is stuff like: 'we had no choice' or '[the officer] did not deliberately fire the shot'.