It appears that the phrase "Busy as a beaver" is a bunch of crap or the phrase actually implies that the person being referred to is a slacker. The beaver didn't even show up Sunday or Monday to finish the job. I know Mondays can be hard but let's show a little initiative! There were signs of more chewing this morning but it wasn't as much as had been done previously. Maybe it's just an Island thing. Our beavers must run on Island time just like the plumbers and electricians when you need them.

Afghanistan

Russia troops back in Kabul 12 years after humiliating defeat

Twelve years after Soviet fighters were forced to withdraw in humiliation, armed Russian troops are back in Afghanistan, raising curiosity and some anxiety in the capital over the possible role of international peacekeepers

On Tuesday, Russian newcomers, armed with rifles and in camouflage uniforms, guarded half a dozen Russian military trucks in a field in Kabul's posh Wazir Akbar Khan neighborhood.
[read more]

The story of the Taliban is over, but…

So the resistance at Kunduz and Kandahar are a part of the game. Perhaps, like in the case of Saddam Hussein, the Americans would not like the Taliban to die. Some sort of threat from the Taliban would be in America's interests. After all, the US needs the terrorist bogey to justify its presence in the Central Asian region. The Americans would now like to use the Taliban the way they are using Saddam Hussein as a symbol of terrorism in the oil-rich Gulf region. They will need the Taliban in the Central Asian region to keep their troops stationed there, in Afghanistan and in Pakistan to supervise an uninterrupted oil flow from the region. You may still have a caricaturised version of the Taliban holding out in certain pockets of Afghanistan.

The surviving Taliban might, off and on, even issue threats to America so that the Americans can justify their stay in Afghanistan. After all, Bush Senior had let American troops stationed close to Mecca, the nerve of the West Asian oil flow. Now Bush Junior will ensure the oil flow from the Central Asian region.
[read more]

Who's next?

US targets three more countries

THE war on terrorism is to be extended to three new countries as soon as the campaign in Afghanistan is over.

Targets linked to Osama Bin Laden in Somalia, Sudan and Yemen will be at the top of the hit list, according to senior sources in London and Washington.

Tony Blair and President George W Bush have agreed that the momentum created by the anti-terror coalition's successes must be maintained with swift action elsewhere.

"We have the wind at our backs and we don't want to lose it," said a senior Washington source.

Preparations are under way in all three countries. [read more]

thanks to BookNotes

Americans want a war on Iraq and we can't stop them

President Bush's prime purpose now is gearing up America for a wider war. "It's not over. It's not over," he told Newsweek, concerned that the people might think otherwise. "Afghanistan is just the beginning," he roared to an audience of soldiers at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. "America has a message for the nations of the world. If you feed a terrorist or fund a terrorist, you're a terrorist."
(...)

Though Iraq may not be the first place that comes under fire, it's by far the most sensitive, and now the president, talking to Newsweek, gives Saddam his warning: let the UN arms-inspectors back in, or face the consequences.

The American mood will tolerate this, perhaps demand it. Not long ago, speculation about the Iraqi option was linked to an anxious need for incontrovertible proof of al-Qaida connections. Now, the test is becoming looser. What looks like a speedy victory in Afghanistan is galvanising US ambitions to be the world's super-enforcer, whatever the problems, for a global cause Americans believe in more clearly than they've believed in anything since the second world war. It's hard to identify a single voice that might be loud enough to stop it.
[read more]

Recession News

WHY THIS RECESSION WILL BE WORSE.
Wretched Excess

If this recession is like every other American recession since World War II, that optimism is fully merited. The problem is that there's mounting evidence it's not. This time around, it wasn't a change in consumer spending that brought the economy to a standstill; it was largely a change in business spending. As anyone who has picked up a financial page in the last year knows, the story of the 1990s is that company after company bet heavily that consumers would purchase huge amounts of goods and services in the future, particularly in areas related to information technology (IT). Businesses raised vast amounts of capital, bought and sold equipment at a frenzied pace, and dramatically increased their productive capacity--only to discover that every other business was doing the same, thus increasing the nation's overall productive capacity far beyond what consumers could realistically support. When that became apparent, businesses literally stopped investing in new equipment, and the economy--whose growth in the late '90s had been driven in part by a surge in investment--suddenly and dramatically faltered.

Cutting interest rates in the middle of this type of economic slowdown, as Greenspan did this year, won't help much. As long as companies feel they already have too much equipment, no amount of interest rate cutting will induce them to buy more. And cutting rates before such a slowdown begins in hopes of staving it off--as Greenspan did in 1998--may even be counterproductive. Low interest rates at the tail end of a long boom can encourage businesses to binge on new equipment when they already have too much. Then, when the optimism finally fades, companies must shed even more productive capacity. Some companies retire equipment; others merge or go out of business. Either way, the adjustment is more painful than it would otherwise have been.
[read more]