The Old-Fashioned Way to Mess with Putin

A Slate article on U.S. strategy for Ukraine caught my interest in part because it includes a fundamental point from my original Crimea post: There are no U.S. vital interests in Ukraine that justify the risk of a shooting war with Russia.

Beyond my point about it not likely the main Crisis hotspot, Fred Kaplan suggests that the best victory there is helping Kiev win economically. Support their economy, make them more successful than Russia, and then ... actually, it's not clear what then, except that Putin wouldn't like it. Although it wouldn't be as easy to say the country is a Western puppet if the main support is Apple computers - much less affordable in Russia anymore - rather than Boeing munitions.

The extra fun part of that, of course, is the replay of the Reagan Cold War strategy, this time against Russia rather than the USSR: Make them see that their way leads to a crappy life, and they'll give it up on their own. It's like the fable of the sun and the wind, who had a bet to see who could get a man's coat off. The more the wind blew, the harder the man held on; when the sun shone, he took it off himself.

If we're going to get involved, we should aspire to be like the sun.

A Quick Thought on ISIS

There are people around talking about how Chamberlain is agonizing again, knowing from his current vantage that we are re-making his mistake.

I'd say, though, that this doesn't feel like Munich. There's no appeasement - indeed, anything that ISIS does seems to make their situation worse. The United States staying out of it is a matter of realpolitik,  not cowardice or misguided optimism.

There is a resemblance, though, to Bleeding Kansas - well-meaning changes in the political situation causing law and order to take a quick downward slope. Evidently skirmishes continued in the area until the Civil War started. Which doesn't mean they stopped, then, just that they were less significant by comparison.

If that is the appropriate analogy, what's next? We can expect ongoing fighting in area, until the decision comes to make these "skirmishes" irrelevant.  Unless it turns out this was never the real battlefield for the United States at all, and the REAL Crisis will come from a different direction. Which seems quite possible.

A Slow Crisis Day

Under Crisis, we have mostly repeats: Japan hostage crisis, Ukraine insanity crisis, a call-back to the financial crisis (noted there as starting in 2007) and eventually a reference to the Ebola crisis. Plus this Brian Williams controversy or crisis or whatever people want to call it.

A number of items under Cloverfield, mostly about the movie itself or people related to the movie. And a callback to the K-cup issue previously noted.

Apocalypse is staying about the same: the X-Men movie, again, plus the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moving the doomsday clock up another minute.

Shouldn't mind it though. We've had enough days where every day it is something new.

Pick Your Crisis

Here at the end of January, there is no end to the available Crisis stories:

• Russia has its ongoing economic Crisis
• Ukraine has its ongoing Russian Crisis
• Greece has initiated a Crisis for the European Union by electing a "radical left" party with a platform of not continuing with austerity measures originally intended to rebuild the economy.  And this is not intended as a smear: SYRIZA contains former elements of the Greek Communist Party,along with other parties like International Workers that appear communist in all but name, while using red as a main color in their presentations and rallies, so it shouldn't be controversial to say that they really are Communists. 
  
• As far as oil producers are concerned, the steep drop continues to be a Crisis, as well.
• Japan has a hostage crisis, too.

Hardly have to look up anything else. Although there is an anti-Keurig campaign that's done a promotional video based on Cloverfield.

The New Millennial Film Era is Almost Here...Again

We are due for the start of a new era of film, one with a Millennial flavor.

A recent Los Angeles times summary of Sundance suggests that the time is almost here. Even if most of the folks mentioned are Xers, still - like last time, when the talk was all about danger.

Which is to say, it's - still, like last time - almost here.

Still, the article specifically mentions moving away from Boomer stories. Not in the expected direction, necessarily: The most striking images are of Silents, such as Chuck Norris (b. 1940),  Evel Knievel (b. 1938), and Stanley Milgram (b. 1933) - who I initially confused with a different famous experiment run by someone born in the same year. Although there are a few Xers and even Millennials as subjects in some cases. The new era is on its way.

The N-1 and the Failure of the Chief Designer

Was the failure of the N-1 the Soviet Union's equivalent of the Challenger Disaster?

There's a lot to draw together here, so pay attention...

In 1986, the space shuttle Challenger exploded soon after liftoff. It was later determined to be due to hot gases leaking from the solid-fuel boosters due to the failure of an O-ring. This failure was due to an unexpected sensitivity to cold that prevented a proper seal. Then-current administrative culture at NASA also made it difficult to recommend aborting the mission, even though there was evidence of the danger.

...Which made it similar to another disaster 64 years earlier, when the crew of the mighty Titanic ignored warnings and continued at high speed into an area where icebergs had already been seen. Walter Lord, writer of the seminal Titanic history A Night to Remember, specifically pointed out the similarities in the two disasters. Both were considered wake-up calls about the limits of technology and the risks of hubris.

Titanic and Challenger happened near the start of their respective Third Turnings, and might even be considered THE starting point of each. If it is common for this lesson of hubris to be learned at this time, we should expect to see it happening in other Third Turnings for other cultures - and the N-1 might be an example of that.

There are some definite problems with this interpretation.  The N-1 failed in 1969, which would have to be more near the end of the USSRs Third Turning. In addition, the news was not widespread until the fall of the Soviet Union over twenty years later - which would prevent it from having a cultural impact.

Except that such a large effort had to have had a large number of workers who all would have known or guessed what happened. And even if the fate of the N-1 was unknown, that the Soviet Union had fallen behind in the space race, despite having a massive lead at the start, must have had some impact on the people of the USSR.

Oh What The Heck - Today in ....

Apocalypse: X-Men, again - without Patrick Stewart or Ian McKellen, though. Sigh.

Cloverfield: American Sniper beat its January opening.

Crisis: Some concern over a new European currency crisis. And the Russian economy, too, of course.

Collapse: I-75 overpass collapse. And, well, yeah, the Packers.