Filed under: Politics, Foreign Policy, Economy, Capitalism, National Security, The United States, Russia | Tags: Vladimir Putin, American National Interest, American Crossroads
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Filed under: Election 2012, Foreign Policy, National Security, Russia, The United States | Tags: National Defense, President Barack Obama, President Dmitri Medvedev
The President of the United States takes a solemn oath at his inauguration,. to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution. The American people place a fundamental trust in a President that he will do all within his powers to defend the country from foreign military threats. That trust applies as well to the threats posed by ballistic missiles.
This is not the first time this President has been caught off guard, by a microphone still ‘hot’, making comments not intended to be heard by the American people. The President met today, March 26, with Russian President Dmitri Medvedev in Seoul, South Korea.
Baker Spring of the Heritage Foundation sketches the background:
President Obama has been willing to subordinate the missile defense program to his policies for arms control and nuclear disarmament for a long time. One need go no further than to read a portion of the preamble to the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), which is the new strategic nuclear arms control treaty with Russia, on the subject of missile defense. It states that U.S. missile defense capabilities must come down as the numbers of strategic nuclear weapons come down under the treaty.
The Obama Administration spared no effort to defeat an amendment in Senate to strike this language in the New START preamble. The President’s comments in Seoul are completely in keeping with this past behavior. What is now evident is the scope of the manipulation he is pursuing to fool the American people about something essential to their security. It is now undeniable that President Obama is breaking the most basic trust the American people put in any President.
The exchange caught by the ‘hot’ microphone was as follows:
President Obama: “On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this, this can be solved but it’s important for him to give me space.”
President Medvedev: “Yeah, I understand. I understand your message about space. Space for you.…”
President Obama: “This is my last election. After my election I have more flexibility.”
President Medvedev: “I understand. I will transmit this information to Vladimir [Putin].”
Russia’s definition of missile defense cooperation is problematic to say the least. Regardless of the level of knowledge Russia has of the U.S. missile defense program—a result of hours of unilateral U.S. briefings—Moscow insists on having veto power over Washington’s decision to shoot down a missile on its way toward its victims. On other occasions, Russia demanded binding limitations on speed or geographical coverage of U.S. interceptors.
Due to the pressure of concerned Senators, the President certified that “it is the policy of the United States to continue development and deployment of United States missile defense systems to defend against missile threats from nations such as North Korea and Iran, including qualitative and quantitative improvements to such systems” in New START’s resolution of ratification. It appears the President is ready to walk away from his own commitment.
After all, it would not be the first time that he failed to honor his promises made pursuant to New START ratification. He already failed to provide funding for U.S. nuclear weapons infrastructure, deemed essential at the time of ratification. If left unchecked, the Administration’s policies will lead to America’s becoming increasingly vulnerable. This is the wrong posture for the United States. North Korea is preparing to launch its long-range missile, and ballistic missile proliferation is growing worse. Heritage research shows that a “protect and defend” strategy—which would combine offensive, defensive, conventional, and nuclear weapons—is the best response for this uncertain environment.
Obama has already betrayed our allies Poland and the Czech Republic, abandoning plans for ground-based interceptors and missile defense radars needed to defend against Iranian missile launches. He has also demonstrated that he has no problem with lying to the American public. He has his own goals for the nation, and he prefers to keep those hidden — until he is reelected and there are no more restraints on his actions. This is an appalling betrayal of the American people — and not even the first one. We’ll just have to see that there is no second term.
Filed under: News of the Weird, Russia, Science/Technology | Tags: Recreating an Extinct Species, Russia and South Korea, Wooly Mammoth
Woolly Mammoth Recreation: Wikimedia Commons
Researchers from Russia and South Korea are planning to resurrect the Ice Age woolly mammoth. The scientists signed a deal on Tuesday to share technology and research that could lead to the birth of a mammoth clone, gestated in a surrogate Indian elephant mother.
Mammoth remains were uncovered in thawed Siberian permafrost, and around the world, scientists have been trying to extract DNA from the remains. Paleobiologists previously were able to reproduce mammoth blood protein, and Japanese researchers want to resurrect the mammoth within five years.
This new project will move forward if the Russian institution, the North-Eastern Federal University of the Sakha Republic can ship the mammoth remains to the Koreans.
The project would work like earlier cloning studies that successfully reproduced dogs, a cow, a cat, a pig, a wolf and coyotes. The nuclei of mammoth somatic cells would be implanted into the nuclei of donor elephant eggs, to produce elephant embryos with mammoth DNA. The embryos would be implanted then in elephant wombs, where they would gestate for 22 months.
The earlier protein study showed that we can learn much by working with these extinct creatures — the mammoth blood was found to contain an anti-freeze component that no one would have guessed existed.
Woolly mammoths were not significantly larger than today’s African elephants, and males reached around 9 feet. Unlike today’s elephants they had small ears, the largest found are only 12 inches long. The tusks were extremely long, up to 16 feet long, and markedly curved. It’s not clear what the purpose was, they may have been used as shovels to clear snow from the ground and reach the vegetation underneath.
By 1929 the remains of thirty-four mammoths had been found with frozen soft tissues. Only four were relatively complete. Large amounts of mammoth ivory have been found in Siberia. Mammoth tusks have been items of trade for at least 2,000 years. They disappeared at the end of the Pleistocene —10,000 years ago, but an isolated population survived on Wrangell Island until roughly 1700 B.C. Woolly mammoths appear in cave art in Dordogne, France. Mammoth specimens have been found in North Carolina and Kentucky.
I suspect that anyone who saw Jurassic Park would find the cloning effort a little uncomfortable at best.
Filed under: Environment, Russia, Science/Technology | Tags: A Pleistocene Plant, Narrow-Leafed Campion, Russian Academy of Science
This pretty little plant, Sylene stenophylla, was grown from a seed from a tiny fruit burrowed into the dirt by an Arctic ground squirrel, to eat later if he could remember where he had buried it. The fruit quickly froze in the cold ground and was preserved in permafrost, waiting to grow into a full-fledged flowering plant for 30,000 years. Russian scientists have now regenerated this Pleistocene plant, transplanting it into a pot in a lab. A year later, it grew and flowered and bore fruit.
This specimen is distinctly different from the modern-day version of Sylene stenophylla, or narrow-leafed Campion. The fruits were buried about 125 feet in undisturbed, never thawed permafrost sediments at roughly 19.4° F. Radiocarbon dating showed that the fruits were 31,800 years old, give-or-take about 300 years. Imagine. Seeds store the embryo of a new plant and store it in protective material until conditions are right for it to germinate.
The Russian team led by David Gilichinsky at the Russian Academy of Sciences grew a modern-day narrow-leafed Campion as a control so they could see the differences among the two generations — the Pleistocene version put out twice as many buds, but the modern version put out roots faster. The regenerated ancient seeds had a 100 percent germination rate, while the control plants had only an 86-90 percent germination.
Needless to say, scientists are interested in the permafrost as an important new gene pool. Other ancient ground squirrel burrows have been found in Yukon territory and in Alaska.”We consider it essential to continue permafrost studies in search of an ancient genetic pool, that of pre-existing life, which hypothetically has long since vanished from the Earth’s surface,” the authors write. The paper was published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Filed under: China, Europe, History, Iran, Iraq, Middle East, Russia | Tags: 1162—1227, Genghis Khan, He Created an Empire
I have mentioned that I never seem to read anything when it first comes out— partly because I usually have a stack of books that I have not yet read, but partly also because you have to be in the right frame of mind for some books. A good friend recommended Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World to me years ago. It was published in 2004, but I never got around to it until now. When I get excited about something I have read, I’m inclined to insist that everyone else read it right now. So consider yourselves warned.
I knew nothing about Genghis Khan except the”Mongol hordes,” Ulaanbaatar, the steppes, and the first stanza of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Xanadu” which I recalled word for word from Survey of English Literature quite a few years ago. Not promising. So I read the Introduction.
In 1937, the soul of Genghis Khan disappeared from the Buddhist monastery in central Mongolia along the River of the Moon below the black Shankh Mountains where the faithful lamas had protected and venerated it for centuries.
Well, who could resist that? Born in 1162, and his soul disappeared in 1937.
Year by year, he gradually defeated everyone more powerful that he was, until he had conquered every tribe on the Mongolian steppe. At the age of fifty, when most great conquerors had already put their fighting days behind them, Genghis Khan’s Spirit Banner beckoned him out of his remote homeland to confront the armies of the civilized people who had harassed and enslaved the nomadic tribes for centuries. …
In conquest after conquest, the Mongol army transformed warfare into an intercontinental affair fought on multiple fronts stretching across thousands of miles. Genghis Khan’s innovative fighting techniques made the heavily armored knights of medieval Europe obsolete, replacing them with disciplined cavalry moving in coordinated units. Rather than relying on defensive fortifications, he made brilliant use of speed and surprise on the battlefield, as well as perfecting siege warfare to such a degree that he ended the era of walled cities. Genghis Khan taught his people not only to fight across incredible distances but to sustain their campaign over years, decades, and, eventually, more than three generations of constant fighting.
Jack Weatherford is the Dewitt Wallace Professor of anthropology at Macalester College in Minnesota. He earned his PhD at the University of California, San Diego, and an honorary Doctorate of Humanities from Chinggis Khaan College in Mongolia. He certainly knows how to draw in a reader.
In American terms, the accomplishment of Genghis Khan might be understood if the United States, instead of being created by a group of educated merchants or wealthy planters, had been founded by one of its illiterate slaves, who, by the sheer force of personality, charisma and determination, liberated America from foreign rule, united the people, created an alphabet, wrote the constitution, established universal religious freedom, invented a new system of warfare, marched an army from Canada to Brazil, and opened roads of commerce in a free-trade zone that stretched across the continents. On every level and from any perspective, the scale and scope of Genghis Khan’s accomplishments challenge the limits of imagination and tax the resources of scholarly explanation.
That’s all the sampling I shall give you. Here’s the book at Amazon, though every bookstore should have copies. And here is a young Mongolian musician, Battulga, who plays “Jonon Kharin Yavdal” on a horse headed fiddle which has a skin covered box and horsehair strings (even the bow-string) as in an ancient traditional fiddle. Enjoy.
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Filed under: Russia, Science/Technology | Tags: Exciting Science, Untouched for Millenia, Vostok Lake
Russian scientists in the coldest spot on earth have spent a decade drilling down through the ice of Antarctica. They have drilled to a depth of 12,366 feet to reach a freshwater lake the size of Lake Ontario.
Lake Vostok, named after the Russian research station above it, is the largest of more than 280 lakes under the mile-thick ice that covers most of the Antarctic continent. That ice has kept the liquid water of the lake sealed off from light and air for somewhere between 15 million and 34 million years. Vostok is in the middle of the East Antarctic ice sheet about 800 miles from the South Pole.
The lake is believed by some to contain microbes, but that may have been contamination from the drilling fluid. They have studied the lake with radar and other techniques, so they know its shape and location, but what they will learn from water untouched for so many million years is unknown, but enticing. The need to prevent even the slightest contamination is extreme. If life exists in Vostok, it may exist on Europa, one of the moons of Jupiter, which has subsurface icy water. The water in Vostok stays liquid because of the pressure and the warmth of the earth below it.
Next season, American and British expeditions will try to drill to other subterranean lakes.
Filed under: Foreign Policy, Military, National Security, Russia, The United States | Tags: Economic Freedom, national security, We Are Less Safe
The Heritage Foundation has just released the 18th annual Index of Economic Freedom, released with The Wall Street Journal.
Economic freedom — the ability of individuals to control the fruits of their labor and pursue their dreams — is central to prosperity around the world. Heritage and The Wall Street Journal measure economic freedom by studying its pillars: the rule of law, limited government, regulatory efficiency, and open markets. Things like property rights, freedom from corruption, government spending, free trade, labor policies, and one’s ability to invest in and create businesses all factor in to a country’s economic freedom.
In 2011 economic freedom declined worldwide as many governments attempted to spend their way our of recession, which has never worked. Rapid expansion of government appears to be responsible . Government spending not only failed to halt the economic crisis, but may well be prolonging the trouble. The U.S. economic freedom score has dropped from 81.2 in 2007 to 76.3 in 2012, on a scale of 1-100.
And we are not only less free, but we are less safe as well. The administration has, for three years, followed what they claim to be a strategy of ‘retrenchment.‘ We have withdrawn from Iraq, set a deadline for Afghanistan, called off further expansion of NATO, signed arms-control treaties and now decimated the Pentagon budget.
What they have presented as a strategic vision is seen by the rest of the world as plain old weakness. Osama bin Laden was not the source of all danger in the world, and eliminating him doesn’t mean that “the tide of war is receding.” Our allies have reason to question the strength of our commitments.
Our financial difficulties are not a function of spending on the military, for the cost of being perceived as weak and indecisive can be astronomical. Americans have long believed that the last war was the last one, and that peace is the natural state of the world. Politicians, eager to have more money to spend, believe in peace dividends — money they are entitled to spend now that war is a thing of the past.
The U.S. is the only country in the world without a substantial nuclear modernization program. After Russia signed the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, which unilaterally reduced U.S. forces, Moscow announced the largest nuclear modernization program since the end of the Cold War. America, meanwhile, continues on a path of unilateral disarmament now under the guise of budget constraints.
Section 1227 of the 2012 defense authorization bill prohibits spending any funds that would be used to give Russian officials access to sensitive missile-defense technology as part of a cooperation agreement without first reporting to Congress identifying the specific secrets, how they’d be used and what steps will be taken to protect data from compromise. Obama is required to certify that any technology shared will not be passed on to countries such as China, North Korea or Iran, and that Russia will not use transferred secrets to develop countermeasures and that the Russians are reciprocating in sharing.
President Obama issued a signing statement, something he had previously opposed. He said in the statement that:
he would treat these legal restrictions as “non-binding” and that “my administration will also interpret and implement section 1244 (sic) in a manner that does not interfere with the president’s constitutional authority to conduct foreign affairs and avoids the undue disclosure of sensitive diplomatic communications.
He already betrayed Poland and the Czech Republic who were to host ground-based interceptors (Poland) and missile-tracking radar (Czech Republic). Moscow objected so Obama obediently pulled the plug. Obama claimed we had a better approach that called for using three versions of the Navy’s Standard SM-3 interceptor missile that forms the backbone of its Aegis missile-defense system. The fourth phase is a missile scheduled for 2020, still on the drawing board, that would intercept hostile missiles in the “early intercept” phase. The Russians want the SM-3 secrets and Obama appears to be willing to share.
In spite of Obama’s wishful thinking and desire for nuclear disarmament, Russia continues to rearm. Russia just announced the deployment of the new RSM-56 Bluava submarine launched ballistic missile. The administration’s engagement with Russia has been well-represented with Hillary Clinton’s “reset” button. More to the point were Ronald Reagan’s words: “Trust, but Verify.”
Filed under: Europe, History, Japan, Russia, The United States | Tags: "The Storm of War", A New History, Hitler's Rise to Power
The Storm of War by British historian Andrew Roberts is a new history of the Second World War. Host Peter Robinson, a Hoover Institute Research Fellow, is a wonderful interviewer, and Roberts is a fascinating subject. He explores the incidents and events that led up to the war, how easily it all could have gone differently, and the huge mistakes that changed the course of the war. It was a close-run thing. Churchill and Britain bought time for the Allies to rearm, having been convinced that the First World War was indeed the war to end all wars, and military preparedness was unneeded.
Roberts has had access to a private collection of papers and diaries from the war that had not previously been available, and what he learned from those was the impetus for what might be questioned as why another history of the War when there have been so many? It is a new and fresh consideration of motives and events. I have many books on the war, and I watched this interview absolutely enthralled. Enjoy.
The Kremlin Capella sings a beautiful Russian Folk Song, with wonderful pictures of Moscow in winter. The song is popularly called “The Little Bell.” In Russian Однозвучно гремит колокольчик. We posted this last year, and now it’s winter again. This is perfectly beautiful. Enjoy.
Filed under: Communism, Freedom, Politics, Russia, Statism | Tags: electoral fraud, More Democracy, Protests in Moscow
Anti-Kremlin demonstrations— discontent over oligarchical rule spilling into the open. These are largely young people in their 20s and 30s. Russian youth want more democracy, more people power and more justice. These are the largest protests seen in the Putin era.
(h/t: The Exiled)
Filed under: Foreign Policy, National Security, Russia, The United States | Tags: A Blow for Putin's Party, The Duma Elections, United Russia Support Drops
Reuters reports:
Russian voters have dealt Vladimir Putin’s ruling party a heavy blow by cutting its parliamentary majority in an election that showed growing unease with his domination of the country as he prepares to reclaim the presidency.
Results are not complete, but they show Putin’s United Russia party as struggling to even win 50 percent of the votes in today’s election, compared with 64 percent four years ago. Opposition parties said even that outcome was inflated by fraud. This election is for the Duma,the lower house of Russia’s parliament; presidential elections come in March.
Putin is still expected to win the presidential election, but the decreased majority in the Duma could damage the authority of the man who has ruled Russia for almost 12 years. Putin has ruled Russia with a mixture of hardline security policies, political smarts, and showmanship. He has recognized, one observer commented, that allowing complaints and grumbling to flourish did not harm the state, and gave the people an outlet for their feelings. His flat tax has been popular.
Results for 70 percent of the voting districts showed United Russia with 49.94 percent of the vote. But the elections were held in a climate of a lack of trust in Putin, Medvedev and United Russia. Putin restored order in a country suffering from a decade of chaos after the collapse of the Soviet Union. He rushed a separatist rebellion in the Muslim Chechen region, restored Kremlin control over wayward regions, and presided over an economic revival. Yet many voters refer to United Russia as the party of swindlers and thieves and resent— the gap between rich and poor.
[Putin] has maintained a tough man image with stunts such as riding a horse bare chested, tracking tigers and flying a fighter plane. But the public appears to have wearied of the antics and his popularity, while still high, has fallen. …
Putin and Medvedev, who took up the presidency in 2008 when Putin was forced to step down after serving a maximum two consecutive terms, made a brief appearance at a subdued meeting at United Russia headquarters.
Medvedev said United Russia, which had previously held a two-thirds majority allowing it to change the constitution without opposition support, was prepared to forge alliances on certain issues to secure backing for legislation.
From everything I read about Russia, many still deplore the downfall of communist rule. The communist vote almost doubled to 20%. Russia has always been an extremely authoritarian country. Those who expected a democracy as we know democracy were probably too gullible. Russia is an enormous country spanning 5,600 miles. Complaints of election irregularities spanned the country in spite of a Western-financed electoral watchdog. Two liberal media outlets said that their sites had been shut down by hackers intent on silencing allegations of fraud.
Nevermind the naive ‘reset button.’ Though Russia has long considered itself a European country, it shows no signs of particular friendship with the West. It has been an active participant on whatever happens to be the “other side.”
Filed under: Communism, History, Russia, The United States | Tags: Joseph Stalin, Svetlana Stalina, The U.S.S.R
Lana Peters was born Svetlana Alliluyeva Stalina. She was the only daughter of Joseph Stalin. She grew up in the Kremlin, where she was Stalin’s “Little Sparrow.”Her life was spent in the shadow of the man who helped to establish Soviet communism., and killed far more people than Hitler, who gets far more public opprobrium.
Her mother shot herself when Svetlana was 6, after her parents argued at a banquet, although Svetlana didn’t learn that until she was a teenager.
In 1929 Stalin demanded “the eradication of all kulak tendencies and the elimination of the kulaks as a class.” It was in effect a war declared on a nation of smallholding farmers. More than 2 million peasants were deported, 6 million died of hunger, and hundreds of thousands died of deportation. That was followed by the Great Famine, when more than 6 million people in the Ukraine and the Northern Caucasus died of forced starvation in one of the darkest periods of Soviet Russia.
That was followed by the Great Terror, which in turn was followed by the Great Purge of the Red Army, which left Soviet Russia very short of experienced military officers for their battle against Nazi Germany. Svetlana described seeing her father die of a stroke in 1953. As the USSR began reforms under Khrushchev, her life became increasingly difficult and she dropped her father’s name in favor of her mother’s, Alliluyeva.
In 1967 Ms. Alliluyeva defected to the U.S.,with a manuscript of her memoir in hand.Her memoir “Twenty Letters to a Friend” was an international best seller, as was a sequel “Only One Year” which described her defection to the U.S. via India. She had traveled there to deposit the ashes of her third husband, a prominent Indian communist, in the Ganges.
She became a U.S. citizen, and settled in Princeton N.J. She visited Taliesin West on an invitation from Frank Lloyd Wright’s widow, where she met and married architect William Peters, a Wright protégé. They had a daughter, though they soon split. In 1984, Ms. Peters returned to the USSR, reuniting with her son, a physician. She denounced the West as starkly as she had once denounced her homeland. She stuck that out for two years, and then returned to the US.
She eventually settled in Richland Center, Wisconsin, where she lived in obscurity in a one-room apartment. She lived always in the shadow of her father’s life. It was not an easy history to bear.
