After oil, shale and isolationism

There has been much talk of the decline of US influence. Conservatives & Neo-Cons blame Obama for being indecisive, or weak. Liberals blame the poisonous legacy of George W Bush.

There are probably a gang of centrists somewhere blaming the unique circumstance of one following the other.

One of the reactions to the fallout from US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq has been 'frack baby frack'. The call for energy independence.

While there are environmental concerns, and green campaigners must despair at the continued reliance on fossil fuel implied, there is a seemingly powerful logic for the US to pursue the shale revolution.

Firstly shale promises to all but eliminate US dependence on the permanently unstable middle east. This is a persuasive argument not just for anyone who favours an isolationist approach to world affairs, but a big slice of Americans who do not want to see their army deployed abroad if at all possible.

Secondly, shale holds out the possibility of a new boom in well paying manual jobs, not just in the actual drilling industry, but also the related supply chain. Manufacturing jobs. This is a vital issue for a whole swathe of Americans. Blue collar people in particular, both Democrats and Tea Partiers

Thirdly, while shale oil and gas are fossil fuels, and there is a risk of groundwater contamination, dependence on coal is inevitably reduced. Exploitation of shale resource will help reduce the US carbon footprint. This may not satisfy people with green issues at the top of their agenda, but it brings many people on side who think Global Warming is an issue, but are somewhat vague on the actual details.

Fourthly, there is a group who may mot think burning fossil fuels is a mortal sin, but still want to preserve what is left of the wilderness, huntsmen, outdoors type people, as well as some environmentalists. They might be happy to avoid drilling up Alaska .Still achieving the goal of relaxing the ban on drilling in the arctic without actually doing so. Namely producing more energy at home.

Fifthly there is the balance of payments.

Last, but by no means least, there is the corporate constituency.

Looking at the list above, the combination of local activists concerned about groundwater combined with people opposed to any extension of fossil fuel dependence were never going to prevail. Perhaps we should take a bit of time to think about that. If poisoning the water supply is not a slamdunk argument, are we inevitably doomed?

Moving swiftly on to the issues that do matter in the society we have built, the arguments for exploitation of shale, both strategic and economic speak of a stronger America.

But what about unintended consequences. Those lamenting declining US influence might wonder what this has to do with shale, but a key plank of global dominance has been the longstanding alliance with Saudi Arabia. Formed at the end of WWII, this alliance is centred on a simple construct, security for oil. Saudi Arabia, coupled with ally Kuwait, acts as a swing producer in the OPEC oil cartel, keeping the price of oil at an acceptable level. In return the US guarantees the security of the Saudis in particular, and the gulf in general.

But the foundation of that deal is now shaking. The invasion of Iraq took place in the face of Saudi opposition. Whatever the intentions o the US, turning a neighbour with whom the Saudis share a border into an Iranian proxy (at best) or even a failed state is not conducive to security, which is the US side of the bargain.

The invasion of Iraq was dubbed as part of the response to the 911 attacks. If it was, it was severely misguided, but it should always be remembered that 15 of the 19 hijackers (not to mention Osama bin Laden himself) were Saudi citizens. So the effect of the Iraq war can be exaggerated, even before then many Saudis were desperately unhappy with the relationship of mutual dependence.

So the US is no longer the guarantor of security it was. If it also no longer needs the oil, the arrangement of 'security for oil' looks dead in the water.

Not everyone will lament the end of that arrangement. But the Middle East remains a massively important strategic location. It is not Obama's perceived 'weakness' which adds to the perceived 'incompetence' of George W Bush, but the indisputable fact that the US is no longer the biggest customer.

The gulf Arabs have been trading for centuries, if not millennia. America's capitalists surely must understand the importance of not offending your biggest customer. Nowadays that means don't mess with China.

The flip side of America's new found energy independence is a loss of influence in the Middle East. You will find rentaquote Neo Cons lamenting Obama's weakness on the one hand while calling for energy independence on the other. They won't tell you that energy independence might be a cause of declining US influence.

The real question for America is 'Does it really matter?'. What is US influence in the Middle East for, if not to guarantee oil supply? Is the focus of world trade moving from the Atlantic to the Pacific? Whatever the political class may think, or pundits tell you, most citizens of the US would swap any amount of world influence for a return to the days of steadily rising incomes.

Perhaps the effects will be felt more in the Middle East than in America. In the Gulf, in Egypt, perhaps even in Israel.

Ukraine, war or appeasement?

The Western world looks at Ukraine like a slow motion train crash.

Here is a country in Europe on the borders of the EU being slowly dismembered.

We do nothing.

Problem is, what can we do? The options are pretty simple.

We do nothing, and hope that Putin's Russia will then be, in the words of Bismarck, a 'satiated power'.

We tool up for war, knowing this will be a confrontation between Russia and the West.

We keep on talking, indulging in a game of bluff. Pretending that we will actually do something.

All of the above include the ever present, nearly always ineffectual, economic sanctions.

Almost everyone thinks that nothing is unacceptable. And I can understand why. Appeasement does not have a good track record anywhere, let alone central Europe. But is the 'do nothing' option really appeasement? I'm not so sure. Appeasement generally involves a lot of talking. Plenty of diplomacy, and the crafting of an agreement which reflects whatever facts on the ground an aggressor has created.

It is really the third option that is appeasement.

In the final analysis there is only one question. Are we prepared to send our sons and daughters to die in the name of Ukrainian freedom? It is a stark question because we face a stark choice: the alternative to doing nothing is to fight.

For me the answer is no. I am not prepared to die for Ukrainian freedom. Nor to send my children to.

It appears that Russian is prepared to sacrifice her children in this fight. There is no amount of diplomacy, sanctions, negotiations, agreements which can bridge this gap.

We can acquiesce with words of condemnation. It may seem weak, but it is at least honest. Endless rounds of talks to legitimise a limited annexation of Crimea, Donbas, Mariupol etc. that is what appeasement looks like. That is what Chamberlain did in Munich.

All the talk of agreements and ceasefires in Minsk. All our threats of arming Ukraine, committing ourselves to Ukrainian freedom, unless we are prepared to sacrifice our children, it is nothing but a game of bluff.

Sometime great poker players can win a game of bluff. Perhaps Merkel or Obama fit that mould. But no one, however great a player, can truly win a game of bluff when the other side is for real.

I really don't think Mr Putin is bluffing. Everything he has done so far is a bit more extreme than we Westerners expected. He really does mean to recapture a slice of his near abroad.

We may not be prepared to intervene to stop him, but neither should we legitimise that with an agreement in exchange for a commitment to stop at some new, arbitrary border.

Feminism, Masculism and the PUA 'community'

On line there had been a lot of chatter about PUA people. This acronym stands for pick up artist. This is all about the idea that a man can learn a technique get a whole load of women into bed.

While many a young male might benefit from a bit of advice on interacting with women from an older more experienced guy, the sort of advice on offer from PUA people really is stunningly, awfully, bizarrely bad.

Feminists have therefore targeted these people on line, and in real life, with lots of trolling, picketing and the like.

It is all pretty unsavoury. And, being anonymous here, I thought I might make a few observations.

Firstly, there is a whole pseudo scientific philosophical basis to this PUA thing, and it is about grounded in science as new earth creationism. There is a base assumption that there are 'alpha' and 'beta' males. I am not really aware of any research into this in human interaction, but even if it could be shown to be true, any given male would only ever be 'alpha' for a limited period of his life. He would be dependent on his father and later his son (in law) for protection much of the time. Any man who is honest will acknowledge that real men exhibit both alpha and beta behaviour (such that it exists) many times in a single day. Besides, the behaviour promoted by the PUA people, that is, a whole string of casual sexual liaisons, is not alpha behaviour at all, but beta. Alphas stick around to raise their offspring, giving their genetic offspring the best start, and best opportunity of becoming alpha themselves. The behaviour promoted by PUA is more like the lone wolf, any old blues guy could tell you that is beta.

Anyone who has been out with a bunch of guys know there is always one or two who turn women's heads. Whatever the PUA guys tell you, this is not to do with the way they behave (although confidence is always attractive, and arrogance a big turn off), how they look or whatever. but pheremones do have a role to play. If you want to be attractive, search 'Boar mate'. Seriously, this has been tested, it is better than any aftershave, or PUA course. Won't get you laid, but it might get you to a first date. Thirdly the view of women is mind boggling.


By now most of us can imagine there are people who think men are hunters and women 'prey'. But the scientific evidence is kind of different. Human males have much bigger balls and penises than their gorilla or chimpanzee counterparts. There is a scientific reason. Bigger balls make more sperm, this is needed because unlike gorilla's and chimpanzees, there is a certain amount of natural female promiscuity  in humans. That is not to say all women are 'sluts', but the idea of the little innocent angel sitting at home is just as ridiculous as the whole slut thing. Alpha guys need bigger balls to produce lots of sperm to flood out the sperm of the beta guys, you know, those PUA people.

But why the bigger cocks? Well, there is only one real reason. Display. So women can see them. That has a very interesting implication. It is women that control the mating game. It is women that make the choice of mate. The idea that men 'compete' for females, and take them as prey, or a harem, is just societal bullshit. Guess what, women can get laid pretty easily. It really is pretty easy to find a guy that wants a fuck, check any dating website. Women get to choose.

For interesting insights into natural human sexual behaviour search the 'secret life of sperm'.

Which brings me to the feminist response to all this turd. Which is nearly as baffling. Feminists seem to be a collection of people specialising in group think. They talk amongst themselves and construct a model of reality against which they argue, and the real world continues unperturbed by what goes on in this bubble. I  only ever heard about PUAs from feminists, yet some think this is average male behaviour and thought. For feminists, feminism is a good thing, but masculism (a word I have only heard from feminists) is the opposite. A bad thing. Where has the fight for equality gone?

The argument against the PUA people is based on the idea that it is part of 'rape culture', that it encourages abuse of women. This may be true. It probably is. But it is a secondary abuse. In the same way that women's magazines have denigrated women by promoting a dystopian unachievable image of the female form, creating a crisis of body image, so the PUA abuse young men by creating a false, unattainable, dystopian image of what it means to be a man. If young men react by lashing out, they do bear responsibility for whoever gets hit, but the first abuse by the PUA people is of young men.

I also see a parallel between the notion offered by feminists that women could 'have it all' to that offered by the PUA to young men. Folks, you never do get to have your cake and eat it. Women marching into the workplace means they must, necessarily, cede ground at home. It is not possible to be the ever present, attentive mother and a career woman. Not without a time machine. This talk of juggling work and home, that is what men have always done. The PUA also offer a great contradiction. The whole idea of 'playing the field' is to find an ideal partner. To still be 'playing the field' at 40, whatever a feminist or PUA guy might tell you, is just incredibly sad.

There are women who argue sensibly against the PUA abuse of young males, and who can see the contradiction in 'feminism good, masculism bad', but they are not the core voice of feminism. Nor are they likely to be in the near future. Did I mention I only heard about the whole PUA thing from feminists? Check out the 'Narcissism of small differences'.

To be clear, I believe in the equal worth of all people. I'm not sure all feminists do, and the PUA people also seem to have a very low opinion of men.

USAid in Cuban Twitter

The tortured story of the relationship between the US and Cuba takes another twist.

For the record, the US spent some several million dollars setting up a local Cuban version of twitter. Called 'Zunzuneo', Cuban slang for the noise of a humming bird. US govt loyalists are at pains to point out this was not 'covert'. Meaning it does not meet the official definition of a covert operation. But the action was clearly a long way from overt. It was hidden.

For some strange reason, the US just can't help but interfere in Cuba. And for a similarly obscure reason, it always seems to go wrong.

There is a shrill defensive tone to many that work in USAid as they seek to justify this operation.

They point out it was not, strictly speaking, covert. That USAid DOES have a mandate for promotion of democracy, and this is in that line.

They admit there may have been problems in implementation, that the contractor needs looking at.

But there is a failure to acknowledge any problem with the action itself.

This sort of attitude betrays a real problem at the heart of recent US relationships with much of the world.

When the US tried to assassinate Castro with an exploding cigar, that was probably illegal. But it was done by the CIA. We expect that sort of thing from them.

We expect USAid to be feeding the hungry, educating the poor.

When USAid is used as a means to promote America's image abroad, that is inevitable. When it is used as a weapon, that is something which discredits an otherwise exceedingly creditable mission.

There are many in the US diplomatic community who fail to acknowledge this. I am not sure if they are being deliberately obtuse, showing loyalty beyond their own reason, or they really are so myopic that they cannot see the damage done by using aid for something which should really be a CIA operation.

In short, this operation was bloodless. Compared to drones and assassinations it was really pretty cool. Enabling people to communicate, what's the harm.

Had this been a CIA operation, it would have been a plus for America.

As a USAid op, it is a massive minus.

If the US govt cannot see that, their loss of global influence will continue.

Crimea, annexed from Ukraine by Putin

The forces of the Russian federation have annexed the Crimean peninsula.

Always something of a Russian enclave in Ukraine, the region retained the naval base for the Russian Black Sea fleet after the break up of the Soviet Union. Such international arrangements, where sovereignty over a city is ambiguous, or when the citizens of a region are ethnically, culturally or linguistically closely associated with a neighbouring state, are rarely stable.

The internal republics of the Soviet Union were riddled with these ambiguities. Quite a few were deliberately manufactured on the old imperial tradition of 'divide and rule'. Populations and regions were shifted from one administrative region to another as punishment for an official or the collective.

And so we have Transnistria, a Slavic bit of Moldova; Abkhazia and South Ossetia, Russian bits of Georgia; Nagorno Karabakh, an Armenian region of Azerbaijan; Samarkand, in Uzbekistan but closely associated with Tajikistan and the Fergana valley which crosses Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan; all potential flashpoints.

The Russian claim to Crimea could be seen as having a similar basis to the British claim to Northern Ireland. Sure, it might geographically belong to someone else, but the people there are of the Motherland. In the old, declining imperial power the elite must act to retain credibility in front of its own populace.

However there are differences, in that Britain did not so much invade Northern Ireland, as cling to it when  the rest of Ireland broke away. It would have been a better parallel if Russia retained Crimea at the break up of the Soviet Union.

So, Crimea really has been annexed. Unilaterally taken from one state by another. I'm not sure when this last happened in Europe, but it reminds me of the German reoccupation of the Rhineland. The Russian claim is good, but what they should have done is demand a referendum. Assertion of their claim via military might establishes a very worrying precedent.

The West will do nothing (outside of a few economic sanctions) because the West can do nothing. The last time Britain fought a war in Crimea they were close to the height of their imperial power, allied with France and the Ottomans and still it didn't turn out too well. There is no chance of a reversal here.

There was much speculation that Putin would let Ukraine go, waiting for inevitable financial troubles to bring them back into line. I conclude this failed to recognise the importance of these events to Putin's regime. Putin's pitch to his people is that he has halted the decline of Russia. The departure of Ukraine from the fold with a second revolution in a decade would have fatally undermined his narrative. Decline would have been on-going. However much of a gamble this looks, post Syria, Putin's confidence is high. For him, too much was at stake. The risk of inaction seemed small compared to the risk of action.

The rouble can fall, Russia is only too happy to default on its debt. Can the West cope with that? Stocks can fall, that is a buying opportunity. But Sevastopol and the Black Sea fleet? If that falls, it is over the dead body of the Putin regime.

What is Europe anyway? Ask the Ukrainians....

Europe is not really a continent, geographically speaking.

Continents are meant to be defined by tectonic plates. But Europe is just a peninsula of the massive Eurasian Tectonic plate.

India, called a subcontinent, has its own plate. As does Arabia. Much of central America sits on the Caribbean plate, rather than the North American or South American.

So Europe is really not a geographical entity. What, then, is it?

It is sometimes assumed that the distinction is racial, that Europe is where the white people came from. There is little basis for that view in history. Europa was a figure of Greek legend. Pretty soon the term Europe came to have a geographical meaning, which by the middle ages was taken to be the area where the Roman Church held sway.

That is the boundaries of Europe were defined by the Mediterranean (with Islam the majority belief to the south) and the Orthodox Christians to the East, and the Ottoman empire (including modern Greece and much of the Balkans) to the South East.

The world 'Europe' was not much in use, however. Christendom was the term of choice.

Only after the reformation, when the power of the Roman church was broken in large parts of Western Europe did the word 'Europe' come to the fore.

So Europe is a cultural place.

And it is not fixed. Greece rejected Roman papal authority back in 1053. It has not returned to the fold. But from a modern secular perspective Greece is viewed as the cradle of all European civilisation. It was only in the 19th century, during the reign of Westward leaning Tsar Peter the Great that Europe extended far enough east to include the Russian heartland. Although as early as the sixth century BC some Greeks had located the boundary between Europe and Asia somewhere in the Caucasus.

Sometimes people who are not really European attempt to define themselves as such, in order to make a political statement about what they want to be.

Therefore secular Turks will often describe Turkey as a 'European nation', when almost all definitions of Europe would place the country something more than 95% in Asia. The aforementioned Peter the Great shifted his capital to the West as part of an attempt to Europeanise his nation.

It is in this light that I would view the current struggle in Ukraine. Poland, a Catholic country, has a long history of Europeanism. It was the first country in Europe (since ancient times) to elect its head of state. Many Ukrainians see Poland as their closest neighbour. Russia, a big, Orthodox country, with a lot of money and oil, is seen by many other Ukrainians as their natural partner.

This division is often reinforced by language. With Russian being the majority tongue in the industrial East, Ukrainian in the West. But bearing in mind the religious definition of the middle ages Europe the religious divide, where Western Ukrainians traditionally accepted the authority of the pope (although much of their traditions look somewhat eastern, allowing priests to marry for instance). Eastern Ukrainians remained Orthodox, under the authority of the Patriarch of Moscow. The East much earlier became part of the Russian empire, the West under the authority of the Habsburgs or Poland.

In the same way that an ancient European divide, across the Alps, between North and South seems to have reopened in the financial crisis, so too has another divide, between east and west. This latter divide being both ancient and modern.

In the unambiguous West; London, Paris, Washington, Frankfurt, Milan, Madrid, Europe seems pretty much broken and crisis ridden. Nationalism is at the fore to a greater extent than at any time since the second world war. The brief moment at the end of the cold war when Europe looked like it might become a world wide player dissolved in the forming of a post Kyoto G2 consensus.

Whatever it is that unites Europe, is, as ever, overwhelmed by the divisions. In 1914 the Emperors in Berlin and Moscow were both cousins of the Emperor in London. That did not prevent the beginning of an internal European conflict that would destroy European power, propelling the aptly named United States to the role of Global hegemon.

Yet on the streets of Kiev people are willing to die for whatever it is they think Europe is. I have met Israelis and Turks who think joining 'Europe' is their dream.

For these people, being the of 51st state of the USA is unpalatable as an alternative. Europe is their dream. But, as ever, it remains a dream. An ideal. It is 100 years since Europe tore itself apart in the first world war. All attempts at unity since have ended in failure.

It seems the people of Europe forget the cost of their division. In refusing to learn from the past, it is to be hoped Europe does not doom itself to a repeat. For if they cannot learn to live together as brothers, they may well die together as fools.

Bono, philanthropy and taxes

Bono berates us all for the poverty of Africa.

Yet he doesn't pay his taxes, quoting the Gospel of Saint Matthew:- “Let not the left hand know what the right hand does.”

Someone should tell Bono the full quote:-

"But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth".

This teaching does not provide cover to those wishing to avoid their tax liability. It instructs them to keep quiet about what they give to the poor. It specifically tells the like of Bono to shut their big mouths.

Bono would do better to give to Caesar (the state) what is his, all that filthy lucre.

And when it comes to morality, a humble and broken heart is what God requires.