Isis

[Stavros]

I wonder if the US needs to use its current energy position to increase investment in alternative energy. The shale 'revolution' has been driven by oil prices in excess of $100 a barrel, making an expensive mode of production profitable, but fracking needs staggering amounts of water for wells that don't seem to last for more than 5 years -in the Middle East wells are still pumping oil from fields that were opened up in the 1930s.

In the Middle East there has for years been a vast literature on the 'resource curse' and economic diversification, as oil is seen to have distorted the organic development of the economies there, on the basis that if you can't make it, buy it. When you look at the figures which show Abu Dhabi, for example, raking in millions of $$ a month in the 1960s, which became $$ billions in the 1970s you can begin to understand that.

There is also the well-known quote My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I drive a Mercedes, my son drives a Land Rover, his son will drive a Land Rover, but his son will ride a camel variously attributed.

To add to the problem the state has been the primary economic actor, and within the state either elites (as in the Gulf and Saudi Arabia) or the military (Egypt, Syria and Iraq) have commandeered so many parts of the economy that all a form of liberalization has done is increase the distance between the majority of people and the profits generated by local business. Even in Israel, which has been able to link its economy to a globalised economy without having to deal with its nearest neighbours, the gulf between the successful beneficiaries and the rest is the difference between being able to afford an apartment in Tel Aviv or having to live with your parents into your 30s and beyond.
The 'Arab Spring' was in part a reaction against the huge numbers of young people growing up without a job in a society where there is no real jobs market as salaried positions are either available only to certain people based on religious sect, family connections, tribal loyalty whatever, or where individuals actually pay a government official to get a job -one of the scandals in the Iraqi Army under Nouri al-Maliki is that officers were being appointed because they could pay Maliki and his cronies to get the job, thereafter using their position to extract their own benefits from the local economy.
The resource deficit that is expected to follow the decline of oil ought not to be a problem, Singapore and Japan are two successful states that are bereft of basic natural resources, particularly in Japan, so natural resource deficits on their own can be surmounted. This is the basis of the long term growth strategies in Abu Dhabi and Dubai though I don't really see either place as a tourist destination even if the weather is great in the middle of winter.
I also have no idea what IS believe in with regard to the economy. At the moment their economy is based on ransom payments, bank robberies, extortion, and illegal sales of oil, none of which look promising in the long term. The sad irony is that many of the young Britons going to Syria and Iraq are not uneducated or unemployed, but young people with bright prospects -one was a medical student- heading off to fight with young men who have no prospects at all, not least because the assumption is that IS cannot win a military victory against its opponents and that its days are numbered.

In the end, the question, where are the new jobs going to come from? Is as applicable to the Middle East as in the UK and the US. Tough times ahead for all, I think.

Some articles on this issue here:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/richar...b_4926484.html

http://democracyjournal.org/28/the-s...rab-future.php

[buttslinger]

I wrote here before, I think,....I get mixed up, that in the Cave Man Days, when the future of all Mankind was not assured, that the DNA MIND invented a gland that squirted a hormone that made twenty year old men see the world through rosy colored glasses, even when staring out of his cave in January, so he'd go out in the snow and kill a bear and bring it back to the cave and later that night make some babies. Survival is more than surviving, you have to keep an eye out for those around you.
The Railroad Union kept the coal shovelers employed even after the steam engine, In the USA the US Postal Service is in jeopardy because computers are making snail mail obsolete, UPS and FedEx are taking the rest. Things move faster now.
Most people don't even know what they're working for, except a mortgage and food on the table. Cavemen worked about thirty hours a week hunting, gathering, and sweeping out the cave, the rest of the time was spent goofing around and socializing.
The goal of not having to work your fingers to the bone goes against the Middle Class paradise of everybody working 40 hours a week producing producing producing until the cup runneth over. This takes some nurturing and finagling by our World Leaders to adjust and adapt to the realities on the battlefield, I'm talking about the West. The Middle East is the problem beyond solving. ISIS is no accident, We might as well use it as a training ground to test our drones and weapons, and give our professional soldiers some experience getting shot at. ISIS is doomed because they can't maintain hospitals to care for their sick and wounded the rest of their lives. The Ammo and Arms they stole from the Iraqis will run out eventually. Eventually they'll run out of Desert and guys with green grass and children will find it necessary to get serious and spend the money necessary to annihilate them.

I have to get new valves on my old Motorcycle, the new gas without lead chews up the old ones. Some people said the lead in the atmosphere made people retarded. A hundred years ago the air was clean. People got a job within walking distance from their house. I guess Lawrence of Arabia wasn't even in Arabia yet, I imagine a hundred years from now .........it will be the best of times and the worst of times, a time like any other time. Til then, we move on. Perfecting the forty hour work week.

[trish]

When a Bushman was asked why he hadn't taken to agriculture he replied: "Why should we plant, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?" [Lee, Richard B.. "What Hunters Do for a Living, or, How to Make Out on Scarce Resources" Man the Hunter. Chicago: Aldine; 1968. p. 33.]Unfortunately, today the mongongo nuts of the world are hoarded, held and closely guarded by those in the thrall of ambition and power.

[Odelay]

In the end, the question, where are the new jobs going to come from? Is as applicable to the Middle East as in the UK and the US. Tough times ahead for all, I think.

And I thought I was dark.

Seriously though, I have to check myself sometimes. I love the topic on the General board about who would you like to share a beer with, dead or alive. Ironically, it's just the type of conversation I might have with a buddy at a local tavern over some very good ales, not quite recognizing that life couldn't really get any better if I was sharing a beer with anyone else. We talk about some pretty grim stuff here, but in the end the little things in life can really clear out the gloom.

[Stavros]

Having said that, I should also say that humans beings have always been able to find solutions to the problems that confront them/us. As I said in this or another thread, change often happens despite politics rather than because of it.
I have been criticized by friends in the past for approaching issues with a negative frame of mind, and often have to correct myself. Climate change is a challenge that can be met within our abilities, the same is true of armed conflict, disease, and population growth. There are times when nobody seems to have a solution, right now I am not sure that the dismal science, economics, has an answer to the problems that capitalism is experiencing in Europe and North America. A reason for this is that the combination of modern technology and the basic principle of buying cheap and selling dear has undermined mass production industries in Europe and America. Detroit is an example of a city built on mass production that through technology and economic reality has lost that profile. There are solutions to Detroit, but can they replace what it once had? At the moment in 'post-industrial' cities, new jobs are created, but on a smaller scale, and often on lower salaries than before, with less job security.

One could frame the conflict with IS in Iraq and Syria in the context of globalization and modernization and argue that the radical views of groups like IS and al-Qaeda express a fear that modernization is eroding the precise communal bonds of Muslims, and their beliefs and customs which such groups imagine to have existed before they were sundered and corrupted by imperialism and capitalism, and the belief by IS that they -and they alone- can create the conditions in which such threats will no longer exist, which is why it is ultimately a Utopian project.

The more pertinent difficulty is not just the fantasy of a Caliphate, but the very real prospect that an independent Kurdistan would make the re-integration of Iraq impossible and further alienate the Sunni Arabs who currently -perhaps temporarily- support IS as a countervailing force ranged against the Shi'a government and Iran. Localism seems to me to inflate sectarian claims, but unless people become 'stakeholders' in their own state, it does rather beg the question -why should they stay? The US support for the Kurds in this context looks in the long term more rather than less likely to challenge the existence of Iraq as we have known it. I feel Obama and his administration is still responding to events rather than trying to shape them, and I don't see any coherent alternatives coming from the Clinton camp either, which is one reason why I think the Democrats are doomed this week and in 2016.

[broncofan]

I don't know that the end game is an independent Kurdistan but with each of these sectarian conflicts it does appear that the current international boundaries are resisting much stronger forces. I am not saying the Iraqi people are not ready for a pluralistic society, but how is it implemented so that all parties are stakeholders and there isn't an ultimate power struggle? It seems to me that the forces of religion, culture, and identity are much stronger than any institution that can be built in the short term.

That doesn't mean we should give up on pluralism or the idea that a society can be held together without strict divisions among ethnic and religious groups, but there comes a time when reality conflicts with our ideals. I don't mean this as a patronizing commentary on those far-flung places; even in our own societies, we see nationalist and nativist interests empowered from time to time. In the United States, a country built upon being a refuge for immigrants this impulse persists. At some point, partition avoids bloodshed but it makes international problems that were once domestic. How many ways can the world be parcellated?

Note: I am not coming down in favor of partition, but just priming the debate on this subject. This is the dilemma at work. If people feel divided and see one another as alien, how will they share power? How do you instill unity among the people prior to creating the institutions to enable power sharing?

[Ben]

Endless War Causes Endless Terror [Depressing Numbers]:

[Yuengling]

What we need to do is destreoy all the moslams.

[Ben]

Gruesome Photos Allegedly Show Islamic State Throwing Gay Men Off a Tall Building:

https://news.vice.com/article/grueso...-tall-building

[broncofan]

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/27/wo...bani.html?_r=0

Several months ago I posted that Kobani was about to fall and there would be massacres of all the city's inhabitants. It goes to show that you're only as good as the sources you rely on. I read from a bunch of journalists that Kobani was on the verge of falling, but now the Kurds have taken the city.

The fight there also attracted a ton of ISIS fighters who made several pushes to take the city and were sitting ducks for airstrikes. A Pentagon official claimed that airstrikes have killed 6,000 ISIS fighters...depending upon whether they are replenishing themselves, that does seem like a lot of damage.