Winter is coming?

My friend Ael had a nifty tagline for the latest anthropomorphic global warming report from the UN and the potential for some life-altering changes it describes:

"Summer is coming".

Any Song of Ice and Fire-themed political references are jake with me, and it has the added encomium of being terse and ominous at the same time.

That's the scary long-game.

In the short-term, however, some people are getting all sorts of up in the Big Whack about Eurasian politics:

"Nato's military commander in Europe has issued a warning about the build-up of Russian forces on Ukraine's border. Supreme Allied Commander Europe Gen Philip Breedlove said Nato was in particular concerned about the threat to Moldova's Trans-Dniester region."

Wait, wait, I hear you say. Why is this whack, Chief? I hear you say.

After all, Putin is an Evil Emperor, right? Oligarch, Stalin-wannabe, all-around thug and blight on the landscape who wants to grab back all the bits of the old Soviet Union and reassemble the Evil Empire? Why is it whack to be concerned about him waving the Big Red Stick around his western borders?

OK, I'll put it this way; is NATO, and, by inference, the United States, ready to fight Russia over Moldova?

Because that's really the bottom line. Is the West willing to fight (since assuming that the only way to ensure that Putin's ambitions don't mean Russian troops back in Latvia, say, or eastern Ukraine) to contain Russia in its present borders and prevent the reassembly of the Soviet Union? Will we fight to preserve the independence of the Baltics, or the states on the Ruthenian plain?

We weren't in 1945, and that was before the Soviets had nuclear weapons.

We weren't for Hungary in 1956, or for Czechoslovakia in 1968.

Even beyond the question of open warfare, are we prepared for a new Cold War over eastern Europe?

We might need to be, as we were prepared to face off with the Soviets over Western Europe in the last half of the 20th Century.

But if that's the case we, We the People, should really have a serious talk.

Are we ready for another Cold War? What's our goal? What's our strategy? How much are we willing to spend in blood and treasure?

Where do we draw the line where we'll fight the Russians rather than let them cross?

The eastern border of Latvia?

The eastern border of Ukraine?

The eastern border of Poland?

Do we even know?

This isn't a spur-of-the-moment sort of decision, or one that is best made around one individual incident. And, no, I don't like what Putin has been doing in the Crimea and I don't trust his ambitions in the Near Abroad. But to mobilize for a new Cold War is committing ourselves to a winter that might last for generations as the previous one did.

I don't trust GEN Breedlove - or any other serving officer - to make that decision for me. There's a reason that Congress was given the authority to declare war and formalize peace, after all.

Gimme Shelter

By now you probably know that I'm utterly intrigued by oddball bits of history. So it's hardly surprising that I was tickled by this little piece of Cold War memorabilia; a fallout shelter under a California backyard still lingering in the Sixties year it was last visited by its creator.

Apparently there are more of these things lurking down there; the author of this blog post links to one in Alabama, though who the hell would have wanted to nuke Alabama I haven't the faintest; even the stupidest Soviet would probably have suspected that the Red Dawn would break all the sooner for leaving that sump-hole of rural squalor to fester in the lower-lying swamplands of American rednecksylvania.

One cool thing the linked blogger above discusses is something called "Multi Purpose Food" or MPF. This stuff, here:

Now while I'm a child of the Fifties I was a child of the late Fifties and a fairly dim one at that. By the time I was old enough to go to grade school the whole "Duck and Cover" and scare-the-shit-out-of-the-kiddies atom bomb drills fad had pretty much passed (for all that that was only probably a year or two after the Missile Crisis), and I wasn't sharp enough to pick up on it when I was smaller.

I certainly don't remember being particularly frightened of Red missile attacks. Tornadoes? Now those were scary. (we lived in a suburb of Chicago annually smacked by one or two of the things, and my mother would go into a freaking panic every time the radio would broadcast a tornado warning and hustle us down into the cellar to huddle like some Londoners under the Blitz).

So I missed this whole "prepare for the post-apocalyptic world by stockpiling food and ammunition" thing, and so I missed Multi Purpose Meals and MPF. But you gotta love something described as a "...scientifically formulated mix consisted of 68% defatted or low fat soy grits plus dehydrated potatoes, cabbage, tomatoes, onions, leeks, parsley, and spices, and was fortified with vitamins and minerals. Ready after only minutes of simmering in water, a 64 gram dry portion provided most of a tasty, nutritious meal for one person at a cost of only 3-5 cents."

Yum!

License to Il

What IS it about these juche videos?They're like candy; you just can't resist putting them to goofy pop music and dancing around the unheated hovel as you slowly starve to death.

I wonder what the ghosts of the hard men who died for Granddaddy Kim Il Sung in the freezing mountains of 1951 think about the ascent of the third Kim to the Throne of the Hermit Kingdom? From red revolution to hereditary monarchy in three generations?

God, what ridiculous monkeys we humans are.

Friday Jukebox: Juche Edition

Say what you want to about North Korea; yes, it's a vicious, paranoid dictatorship, bristling with weaponry, brutal and callous to the point of internal genocide.But...damn those rascals can get down!

No wonder that call it the Communist PARTY!

(h/t to Armchair Generalist)

Happy 4th...er, I mean 9th of July

Incredibly cool, if more than a little terrifying. I advise following the link to see the NPR video - we're talking megatons of man-made aurora borealis.

Christ, but the Cold War attitude towards radiation was fucked up. Let's not forget about all those glowing sheep in Nevada. You have to look back at the beginning of the Atomic Era and shudder; like giving a monkey a machine gun.

Happy Fourth! (h/t to Crooked Timber)