Posts by Russell Brown
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BTW RB; you’re encouraging Stephen Jones by reading his articles again. You know he likes that.
I still haven't worked out whether the Stephen Jones who wanted to friend me on Facebook was for real ...
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Craig Ranapia ponders the media Olympics and looks forward to the debut of the Large Hadron Collider.
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Mike at the Dropkicks managed to unearth the Michael Phelps frame by frame.
Cool! Picture, thousand words, etc. It plays out like I thought I saw it live -- all in the last reach of the arms.
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Only on a day where we win five Olympic medals can the All Blacks blanking the Springboks in South Africa (for the first time ever) be second page news. And that was a great game by the way, featuring Captain Tackles at his best.
I liked the Guardian's mach report headline: All Blacks manage crisis.
Oh, and Stephen Jones, still a cock:
The contrast between the sides was massive. New Zealand are nothing special. They hardly offered anything in attack and Dan Carter, who missed five kicks at goal, is these days nothing more than a serviceable player with the odd decent flash of brilliance, but New Zealand’s tactical aware-ness and basic skills were on a different planet, and their defence was outstanding. Furthermore, they took massive advantage of the fact that yet again, a referee in charge of a match involving New Zealand was utterly hoodwinked by their infringements at the breakdown. South Africa, staggeringly, were penalised off the park at the breakdown.
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And now Veitch's similarly unapologetic wife wades in with more "it's not fair" whining:
That's two weekends in a row that both papers (and for all I know, the Sunday News too) have been fed stories sympathetic to Veitch.
I've no doubt there's a PR campaign in operation. I find it distasteful.
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Weird #2: Peter Williams & Toni Street implying that Mahe Drysdale might die
I think that might be turning up in a certain television montage ...
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Were you able to pick Phelps earlier in the day? I couldn't :)
Honestly? Yeah, I called that too ...
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Ah, no PM, those are their lane numbers
That was a "oops, sorry, I'm a bit irie and not paying attention" mistake, not a "I've been practising for this" mistake. I picked it by eye ...
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Further intelligence on what's on Michael Phelps' iPod and his Rhapsody hitlist.
Loves the rap, clearly.
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The concluding paragraphs of the Stratfor briefing:
The Russians knew the United States would denounce their attack. This actually plays into Russian hands. The more vocal senior leaders are, the greater the contrast with their inaction, and the Russians wanted to drive home the idea that American guarantees are empty talk.
The Russians also know something else that is of vital importance: For the United States, the Middle East is far more important than the Caucasus, and Iran is particularly important. The United States wants the Russians to participate in sanctions against Iran. Even more importantly, they do not want the Russians to sell weapons to Iran, particularly the highly effective S-300 air defense system. Georgia is a marginal issue to the United States; Iran is a central issue. The Russians are in a position to pose serious problems for the United States not only in Iran, but also with weapons sales to other countries, like Syria.
Therefore, the United States has a problem — it either must reorient its strategy away from the Middle East and toward the Caucasus, or it has to seriously limit its response to Georgia to avoid a Russian counter in Iran. Even if the United States had an appetite for another war in Georgia at this time, it would have to calculate the Russian response in Iran — and possibly in Afghanistan (even though Moscow’s interests there are currently aligned with those of Washington).
In other words, the Russians have backed the Americans into a corner. The Europeans, who for the most part lack expeditionary militaries and are dependent upon Russian energy exports, have even fewer options. If nothing else happens, the Russians will have demonstrated that they have resumed their role as a regional power. Russia is not a global power by any means, but a significant regional power with lots of nuclear weapons and an economy that isn’t all too shabby at the moment. It has also compelled every state on the Russian periphery to re-evaluate its position relative to Moscow. As for Georgia, the Russians appear ready to demand the resignation of President Mikhail Saakashvili. Militarily, that is their option. That is all they wanted to demonstrate, and they have demonstrated it.
The war in Georgia, therefore, is Russia’s public return to great power status. This is not something that just happened — it has been unfolding ever since Putin took power, and with growing intensity in the past five years. Part of it has to do with the increase of Russian power, but a great deal of it has to do with the fact that the Middle Eastern wars have left the United States off-balance and short on resources. As we have written, this conflict created a window of opportunity. The Russian goal is to use that window to assert a new reality throughout the region while the Americans are tied down elsewhere and dependent on the Russians. The war was far from a surprise; it has been building for months. But the geopolitical foundations of the war have been building since 1992. Russia has been an empire for centuries. The last 15 years or so were not the new reality, but simply an aberration that would be rectified. And now it is being rectified.
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