Oct 042011
Uuuunnnngggghhhhh.
Russia’s Putin says wants to build “Eurasian Union”
Some of y’all may be too young to remember the Soviet Union. Some of us do remember it, and its evaporation was a *good* thing. It was, in a word, a massive, massive relief, and one hell of a surprise. As a child of the 70’s and 80’s, I just sorta took it for granted that one of these days a full nuclear exchange would take place before the USSR would go away. It was a hell of a thing to watch live on CNN as the Wall fell and later as Yeltsin stood on that tank.
Putin, however, has spent quite a number of years giving me an uncomfortableness.
13 Responses to “I’ve seen this movie before…”
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Yeah, but what a publicist the guy has:
http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2011/09/vladimir-putin-action-man/100147/
Well, you should welcome it. A stronger Russia helps contain China, assuming they don’t become cold allies.
Obviously you’re a young ‘un. Possibly even a teenager.
Yes, China and Russia hated each other so much during the Cold War that China got its nuclear technology from the Russians. Aren’t dictators great?
Dictators tend not to get along, because the theologies they use to hold their populations in thrall tend to compete with each other; after all, just as there can only be One True God, you can only believe in one brain-numbing ideology at a time. But all dictators still have far more in common with each other than they do with the free world, so don’t count on the emergence of one being a boon because he’ll supposedly counter another.
You clearly do not remember the 1980s. China and Russia are not the best of friends.
I didn’t say they were friends. I said dictators don’t like each other, but that it won’t necessarily keep them from working with each other or banding together aganist free countries.
Everyone has a fantasy. The last time this really seemed to function, the Czars send around the Okhrana to kill off the noisily unhappy.
Hey,let’s forget about the Russians and think about that boot country if you know what I mean….I was
estatic when I heard the news…Sorry Scott but I had to say this….
Scott.
I’d think you’d be for something like this. It could create a new arms race between us and Russia, which would mean a lot of employment opportunities for aerospace engineers like yourself. If we’re beating the Russians, and you’re happily employed pulling in more than $100K a year, and it’s inevitable we’ll beat them, really what’s there to be concerned about?
Ever since Putin came on to the scene, propaganda like this has been spewing all over the place.
If our next president is smart, he/she will gear this country up for an arms race with Russia and China. Also, if he/she is smart he will take the opportunity to create discord between them and pit them against one another.
Now if the U.S., China and Russia were really smart they’d start militarizing space.
I predict that history will show Putin to be full of hot air, the Chinese will isolate themselves, and the United States will come to dominate the 21st Century.
Let’s just give each other a great big Bear hug.
I wonder what the former soviet republics think of this?
I noticed that our missile defence shield in Europe didn’t go anywhere until Russia invaded Georgia. Then countries like Poland all of a sudden decided that they wanted to be our friends and host our missiles. I suspect part of the deal included the US defending them in ways other than the missile shield.
Poland is part of NATO. The US already defends them in ways other than the missile shield.
There is a part of me that misses the Cold War. Things seemed more stable then. And the Iran-Iraq war kept the islamic nuts occupied with killing themselves.
Something just struck me on the subject of Ground-Based Boost Phase Missile Defense.
To do that with North Korea, you would just about have to do that with a base out of Vladivostok, and I don’t think Putin’s puppets would stand for that. Ship based ASATs are smaler, of the standard missile variety, but its going to be a tail chase with a solid trying to catch up to a liquid that is going to stretch its legs and outpace most any solid beyond a certain range, depending on the match up.
Ground based missile defense on our end consists of us shooting up at an already MIRV’ed bunch of targets, with a rapidly rising sensor that doesn’t have much time to say “that’s the nose cone, that’s a decoy, that’s the MIRV bus, here is the war-hea–whoops! done passed it!”
So I don’t know why folks in the military don’t press for space based missile defense. Having assets launched and staged during peacetime, with large assets that are SLS launched, that can have smaller simpler KKV drones by dozens and dozens, seems better to me. Better to have rods from god or lasers that can shoot down at something coming up as opposed to shooting up at smaller targets already coming down. And yet we have anti-‘death star’ articles from folks that I think fear for their logistics-heavy jobs. But they would be easy targets, they say. Any ASAT is just another target for such a battery in space…