January 15, 2006, Map of the playground (Eurasian P.O.V.)
From our comrades at Pravda, we'll start with this view of George W. Bush's favorite sleepaway camp from our old pal Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey that likens Guantanamo Bay to Treblinka, Bergen-Belsen and that sort of thing. That's not exactly fair: our Cuba based camp hasn't actually killed anyone (that we know of) and its scale is much smaller. Otherwise, of course, the whole problem with Bancroft-Hinchey's comparison is that it's not all that preposterous: we will not look back at what we've done at Gitmo (or Abu Ghraib or elsewhere) as our finest hour...
This Pravda piece on the "imminent default and collapse of the dollar" is fascinating for a number of reasons. The "lead" part of the piece, of course, is its least significant: Congress will, as it always does, increase the debt ceiling and prevent the "technical default." However, there are other gems in there that are not widely reported in the American press that may well prove ominous... far more ominous. For one, note that because the numbers will be so miserable, the Federal Reserve measure of "M3 Aggregate" increases in the money supply will no longer be reported starting in March... in other words, an element by which world markets and other governments measure the "real value" of the United States dollar will no longer be available. Now just why might that be? The other item just dropped in there is that (a) Iran is planning on converting the use of the dollar in its foreign trade (i.e. oil sale) operations into euros; in other words, even though it doesn't officially directly trade with the United States in oil, other countries rely on credit denominated in dollars-- so this will, of course, increase use of the euro and decrease use of the dollar, with an effect on overall dollar credit standing (complicated, but the last country to try this was... Saddam's Iraq... the "new Iraq" is back to dollars... think about that...) and (b) China is ominously moving to increase its reserve currency holdings in euros. In other words, we are borrowing faster than we can print up i.o.u.'s to do it, we are making accounting for the effects of that borrowing far less transparent, and our foreign trading partners (or at least their trading partners) appear to have figured all this out. Or... I picked a bad week to give up drinking...
And finally, Pravda gives us this detailed scientific discussion of... talking dogs.
Das vidanya.