Pretty snow!
Winter is here.
Winter arrived last weekend with a good 15 cm snowfall on Saturday. The temperature took a dive to low of about -23 C by midweek. Now that’s winter! Actually colder than it’s been around here since 2005. Today, about 10 cm more snow came down, icy this time.
The bird feeder is out. So far, I’ve seen cardinals, chickadees, and juncos grabbing seeds out there.
Update: I changed the incorrect unit labels to cm from mm.
The US can’t leave Iraq–it is about the oil, in a deeply strategic way
Henry Kissinger (via Corrente):
The disenchantment of the American public with the burdens it has borne alone for nearly four years has generated growing demands for some form of unilateral withdrawal, usually expressed in the form of benchmarks to be put to the Baghdad government which, if not fulfilled in specific time periods, would trigger American disengagement.But under present conditions, withdrawal is not an option. American forces are indispensable. They are in Iraq not as a favour to its government or as a reward for its conduct. They are there as an expression of the American national interest to prevent the Iranian combination of imperialism and fundamentalist ideology from dominating a region on which the energy supplies of the industrial democracies depend.
I suppose K is just adding to what President Bush said about oil on January 10:
The consequences of failure are clear: Radical Islamic extremists would grow in strength and gain new recruits. They would be in a better position to topple moderate governments, create chaos in the region, and use oil revenues to fund their ambitions.
Kissinger paints a fuller picture. US troops are not just holding the line against a “failure” where the wrong people then get oil revenue. The troops are really the last line protecting the entire way of life of the “industrial democracies,” indeed an entire economic system of exploitation and profit.
Sure, the US has enemies in this regard. But there has to be a better solution than endless war.