Peak Oil News and Message Boards

careinke wrote:

kiwichick wrote:@ careinke.....is the war a symptom .....or the cause ??

in otherwords did the war just suddenly erupt ?? .....or where there underlying causes?

I'm pretty sure the US instigated the civil war, which to me seems a lot more horrific than trying to influence an election. Also didn't we hack the communications of other world leaders? How is that different, than possible Russian attacks on the poorly secured DNC files???

Yeah, we "hacked" Merkel's cell phone. Germany eventually dropped the investigation saying they could not prove anything. But at the first instant Merkel was good and pissed. I suspect that the investigation was just white wash. God knows what else we've done we don't know about. Maybe kill a Chilean leader? How many times we try to kill Castro? Bay of Pigs? Much more recent stuff. It's all Short Attention Span Theater.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_ ... war_crimes

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oversea ... ted_States

.
While many believe war have deep causes , the reality is that they just happen .
Their frequency is purely random and follows the same time probability as earthquake or meteorites
IE the damage done by the big ones are equal as the cumulative damage of all the small ones for the same time period

search.. lewis fry Richardson "Statistic of deadly quarrels"
http://www.americanscientist.org/issues ... y-quarrels

The roots of the war in Syria go back to a minority Shia Alawite ruling class run by Assad dominating and oppressing the Sunni majority population. That is the spark that got things going during the Arab Spring.

But military support for the fighters came from Saudi Arabia and Qatar, who wanted to build a natural gas pipeline across Syria to supply Europe and cut out the Russians. Since Obama wanted to take a poke at Russia and side with the Kingdom, our CIA was given the task to insert our big nose into this mess. So here we are.

Sparky,
Thanks, interesting.

Jared Diamond argues the purpose of government is to keep us from killing one another. Not sure how that fits with this data.

Need to back on topic somehow. If we want to continue this thought line I'll start another thread.

Cog wrote:The roots of the war in Syria go back to a minority Shia Alawite ruling class run by Assad dominating and oppressing the Sunni majority population. That is the spark that got things going during the Arab Spring.

But military support for the fighters came from Saudi Arabia and Qatar, who wanted to build a natural gas pipeline across Syria to supply Europe and cut out the Russians. Since Obama wanted to take a poke at Russia and side with the Kingdom, our CIA was given the task to insert our big nose into this mess. So here we are.

Don't forget Assad and his father before him were clients of the USSR and its successor Russia for many decades. The relationship has been mutually beneficial from their point of view, the economic benefits to the USSR/Russia of having a naval port in the Mediterranean so that their forces in the Black Sea can not be cut off totally without severe consequences for Turkey is one side, and the income for Syria along with military equipment, training and other support for the Assad regime(s) make it a natural alliance.

When the Arab Spring started in Tunisia Secretary Clinton got the wild idea that the USA should overturn all the Arab Dictatorships on the Mediterranean Coast. The EU gleefully went along with deposing Quadaffi because they wanted better deals on Libyan Oil and they convinced themselves that they could get a great deal from whomever they supported to take over the country in his place. Unfortunately Libya is not a naturally unified country, there are three major and many minor groups who pretty much despise one another much the same as it was in Yugoslavia in the 1990's. As a result instead of getting a unified friendly cheap oil source like they wanted they got a civil strife polyglot mess where oil exports have still not recovered or even approached a stable high production rate. When prices on the world market fell 25 percent in late 4th quarter 2014 and stabilized there in 1st quarter 2015 they pretty much washed their hands of Libya and have left it a festering cesspool ever since.

Along around the Arab Spring 'rebels' were encouraged in Syria like you stated, which under the UN charter is actually an act of war. Then for whatever reason the USA decided to get all excited and start proclaiming Assad must go. Funny story, the President who proclaimed that and the red Line and many other things about Syria is leaving office in 6 days, Assad on the other hand is quite secure barring an assassination, and with the aid of Russia is now rapidly pacifying the portions of his country in rebellion.

@ t ...interesting use of the word "pacifying "....given the assad 's history

Both Daddy(deceased) and Son Assad are brutes by any measure. Daddy Assad killed thousands when it suited him to put down rebellions in his time. The son is no different. Don't mean the USA needs to involve themselves in the matter. Right now the Russians and Assad are killing Muslims by the thousands. I'm fine with that. I'm also fine with dead Russians and Russia wasting its treasure in Syria.

kiwichick wrote:@ t ...interesting use of the word "pacifying "....given the assad 's history

War means Fighting and Fighting means killing. If you can't understand that a civil war is no different than a war of conquest you really have no clue what war is. More Americans were killed during the US Civil War from 1861-1865 than in all other wars combined including the French and Indian War, revolutionary War, War of 1812, Spanish American War, World War I, World War II, Korea, Viet Nam, Grenada, Panama, Gulf War I, the Yugoslavian civil war and the invasions of Iraq and Kuwait.

@ t ... fighting amongst yourselves is vastly different to you invading my country and fighting ....and killing... New Zealanders....which is what a war of conquest is

@ t re my post @ 2.07 am commenting on the use of the word pacifying......I only wrote the first line of that post.....someone else added the rest

kiwichick wrote:@ t ...interesting use of the word "pacifying "....given the assad 's history

We use it that way in the USA at least since Vietnam.

So T using that word has a special meaning to us of a certain age. Cluster bombs and napalm and agent orange and such.

((Kiwi, when I first posted this I hit "edit" instead of "quote", my apologies.))

@ newfie......no worries dude....all good

.
The underlying crisis which created the Syrian crisis are many , some are cultural , regional and geo-politic
but three factors made the situation intractable ,

Syria is post peak , overpopulated and there was a very hard drought
Bashaar Assad ,is by all account a mild mannered man , he was not scheduled to have power and was training as an ophthalmologist in London when his brother died in a car accident ,
he found itself inheriting the "family business"
quite a liberal at first with a very western educated wife ,he purged the army of the old guard and the secret police of his uncle , the infamous Rifaat .
during the start of the Arab spring he set up a mildly reformist government , it was too little too late and only encouraged the protest with call of ...."Assad must go "... "down with the B'aath party"
things then went pear shape
In one interview , before the war ,Bashaar said , every year I have to find jobs to 200 thousands young men

Wheres the negative numbers?

zoidberg wrote:Wheres the negative numbers?

on denier websites

https://robertscribbler.com/2017/03/09/ ... /#comments

...temperatures over large sections of the world to warm to 40-45 C [104-113 F] by the 2090s.

... such a high degree of heat is incompatible with crops and human habitability.

In the deep past, hothouse events were found, in recent research, to render large sections of the tropics uninhabitable to most forms of life

Half of Human Population Lives and Farms in the Tropics

Sooo, you think migrants are a problem now...just wait a bit!

India seems to be the biggest agricultural crop land farmer with in those zones
Large parts of northern Africa are dessert and the middle east and most of the tropical parts of Australia
https://image.slidesharecdn.com/oconnel ... 1456437434

Yes, the southern half of India, but also SE Asia, including Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines...

And also most of sub-Saharan Africa, and most of Latin America...as it says, about half of the human population...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropics#/ ... ropics.png

So now we know what the MexWall is really for.