Spengler has some serious speculations about Russia’s invasion of Georgia being part of its survival strategy as a nation:

Demographics stand at the center of Putin’s calculation, and Russians are the principal interest that the Russian Federation has in its so-called near abroad. The desire of a few hundred thousand Abkhazians and South Ossetians to remain in the Russian Federation rather than Georgia may seem trivial, but Moscow is setting a precedent that will apply to tens of millions of prospective citizens of the Federation - most controversially in Ukraine.

Before turning to the demographics of the near abroad, a few observations about Russia’s demographic predicament are pertinent. The United Nations publishes population projections for Russia up to 2050, and I have extended these to 2100. If the UN demographers are correct, Russia’s adult population will fall from about 90 million today to only 20 million by the end of the century. Russia is the only country where abortions are more numerous than live births, a devastating gauge of national despair.

Under Putin, the Russian government introduced an ambitious natalist program to encourage Russian women to have children. As he warned in his 2006 state of the union address, “You know that our country’s population is declining by an average of almost 700,000 people a year. We have raised this issue on many occasions but have for the most part done very little to address it … First, we need to lower the death rate. Second, we need an effective migration policy. And third, we need to increase the birth rate.”

Russia’s birth rate has risen slightly during the past several years, perhaps in response to Putin’s natalism, but demographers observe that the number of Russian women of childbearing age is about to fall off a cliff. No matter how much the birth rate improves, the sharp fall in the number of prospective mothers will depress the number of births. UN forecasts show the number of Russians aged 20-29 falling from 25 million today to only 10 million by 2040.

Russia, in other words, has passed the point of no return in terms of fertility. Although roughly four-fifths of the population of the Russian Federation is considered ethnic Russians, fertility is much higher among the Muslim minorities in Central Asia. Some demographers predict a Muslim majority in Russia by 2040, and by mid-century at the latest.

Part of Russia’s response is to encourage migration of Russians left outside the borders of the federation after the collapse of communism in 1991. An estimated 6.5 million Russians from the former Soviet Union now work in Russia as undocumented aliens, and a new law will regularize their status. Only 20,000 Russian “compatriots” living abroad, however, have applied for immigration to the federation under a new law designed to draw Russians back.

That leaves the 9.5 million citizens of Belarus, a relic of the Soviet era that persists in a semi-formal union with the Russian Federation, as well as the Russians of the Western Ukraine and Kazakhstan. More than 15 million ethnic Russians reside in those three countries, and they represent a critical strategic resource.

Spengler continues: “Russia is not an ethnicity but an empire, the outcome of hundreds of years of Russification. That Russification has been brutal is an understatement, but it is what created Russia out of the ethnic morass around the Volga river basin…Putin could not abandon the pockets of Russian passport holders in the Caucusus. That Russia history has been tragic, and its nation-building principle brutal and sometimes inhuman, is a different matter. Russia is sufficiently important that its tragedy will be our tragedy, unless averted.”

You have to give Spengler credit for identifying a “deep game” that Russia might be playing, rather than some comparatively superficial game or combination of them that would seem to have more costs than benefits in the long run. But if Spengler’s thesis is true, how come so many experts on Russia haven’t previously identified and explained the strategy? Or did we just miss that?

The Democratic candidate speaks:

“Our job in this election is not just ‘win,’ although I’m a big believer in winning…I don’t intend to lose this election. John McCain doesn’t know what he’s up against…He can talk all he wants about Britney and Paris, but I don’t have time for that mess”…

No need to gild the lily on this one.

AP:

Russian soldiers showed no signs of pulling back and a top Russian general said Moscow plans to construct checkpoints in the so-called “security zone” around the border with South Ossetia. The cease-fire that calls for both sides to pull back to their pre-fighting positions allows Russia to maintain troops in a zone extending 4.3 miles into Georgia along the South Ossetian border…

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said his troops will complete their pullback moves by Friday, but few signs of movement have been seen other than the departure of a small portion of the troops who have held the strategic city of Gori, another 25 miles west of Igoeti.

The White House made clear it expected Russia to move faster. “It didn’t take them really three or four days to get into Georgia, and it really shouldn’t take them three or four days to get out,” spokesman Gordon Johndroe said.

Germany also pressed Russia to fulfill its pledge. “We have no firm indications the Russian troop withdrawal has really begun,” government spokesman Thomas Steg said Wednesday. He added it is “a very unsatisfactory situation.”

At this rate the Russians could be out by Christmas.

The AP has a story that manages to insult an awful lot of people:

The U.S. presidential election presents a sharp contrast between two types of patriotism: John McCain stands as a war hero. His rival Barack Obama calls Americans back to the can-do spirit of the nation’s founders…Democratic candidate Obama has made patriotism a core theme of his campaign, seeking to inspire voters to overcome divisions of race and party and using his own story as a child of a Kenyan father and Kansas mother as an example of opportunities available only in America…

Obama grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, an island far from the U.S. mainland. As a result, he could be vulnerable to the charge that his background and values are unfamiliar. One possible method of exploiting this emerged last week in a memo by campaign strategist Mark Penn for one-time Democratic hopeful Hillary Clinton, which suggested she could defeat Obama by running an explicitly patriotic campaign. Obama should be presented as someone not “fundamentally American,” said the memo in advice Clinton did not adopt…

Obama would be the country’s first black president and as such faces an extra hurdle as he attempts to persuade voters. “There is a historic suspicion that African Americans are less patriotic,” Kohn said…”Conservative whites look at them (blacks) as unpatriotic…

Question: what cliche or insult, if any, did the authors somehow manage to omit from the piece?

The NYT reports on actions taken, or not taken, by Russia (the AP had a similar story):

Although Russia claimed it had begun withdrawing its troops from Georgia on Monday, Russian soldiers were digging in positions along the highway approaching Tbilisi and showed no signs of pulling back from the severest confrontation between Russia and the West since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Instead, along one major road, four Russian tanks rattled a few miles closer to the capital, and then plowed through parked police cars blocking a road as Georgian police officers stood by in dismay. Elsewhere on the ground in Georgia, no significant troop movement was evident.

Meanwhile, the Secretary of State talked tough about Russia’s invasion and occupation of Georgia and its resumption of deploying nuclear bombers along the coast of Alaska. AP:

Russia is playing a “very dangerous game”…This “is a very dangerous game and perhaps one the Russians want to reconsider,” Rice said of the flights that began again with frequency about six months ago. “This is not something that is just cost-free. Nobody needs Russian strategic aviation along America’s coast.”…the French would be seeking “an explanation from the Russians for why the Russian president either won’t or can’t keep his word…”It didn’t take that long for the Russian forces to get in and it really shouldn’t take that long for them to get out…

“We have to deny Russian strategic objectives, which are clearly to undermine Georgia’s democracy, to use its military capability to damage and in some cases destroy Georgian infrastructure and to try and weaken the Georgian state,” she said. “We are determined to deny them their strategic objective”

If the “strategic objective” of Russia was merely to try to control oil supplies, and perhaps influence oil prices, its actions would be understandable, if not wise. Normally we would be inclined to think that Russia’s actions trump the mere talk of the West.

However, by the grossness of its actions, Putin’s Russia has revealed itself to be a hulking bully, coarse, undisciplined and untrustworthy — and it has done so in such a way that there can be no doubt about its nature. (Indeed, its propaganda is as crude as its actions.) China has benefited by the strategic ambiguity of its intentions; Russia no longer will get the benefit of any such doubts.

In his dealings with Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev, Ronald Reagan often said “trust but verify.” That phrase seems today quaint and inapplicable to today’s Russia. It remains to be seen if Russia’s actions will work towards its benefit, or result in a meaningful and lasting backlash that will harm its long term interests. As has been pointed out, Russia’s degree of connectedness with the West is far greater today than it was in the time of the USSR. Having said that, Russia’s continuing bluster bodes ill for a happy outcome to current events.

The Times of London reports on another Russian invasion, this one of the Riviera instead of the Republic of Georgia. This house purchase for $750 million cost roughly 7x the previous record set a few years ago:

A mysterious Russian billionaire has trumped his big-spending rivals and broken a world record by splashing out €500 million (£392 million) on one of the most sumptuous villas on the French Riviera. The price of the Villa Leopolda, a Belle Époque mansion on the heights of Villefrance, has amazed estate agents but fuelled local worries that the invasion of Russian money on the Côte d’Azur is getting out of hand.

Since the early 1990s, Russian oligarchs, drawn by memories of the Riviera-mad old Russian aristocracy, have been piling into seaside properties at Cap Ferrat, Cap d’Antibes, Saint-Tropez and the other great playgrounds.

None, however, has come near the price with which the unnamed Russian clinched the Leopolda deal with Lily Safra, the widow of Edmond Safra, a Lebanese banker who was killed by an arsonist’s fire in Switzerland in 2003…The previous record for a house was said to be the £57 million that Lakshmi Mittal, the steel tycoon, paid for a property in Kensington Palace Gardens in 2004.

No doubt there are serious and diverse geopolitical reasons behind Russia’s invasion of Georgia, but this kind of outrageous market top in real estate prices paid by Russian kleptocrats and Putin allies suggests that money and oil alone could potentially be a sufficient explanation for Russia’s recent outrageous actions.

The Politico discusses Andrea Mitchell’s performance on MTP. In discussing the Saddleback semi-debate, Michell repeated false allegations by members of the Obama campaign that McCain cheated:

Mitchell reported that some “Obama people” were suggesting “that McCain may not have been in the cone of silence and may have had some ability to overhear what the questions were to Obama. He seemed so well prepared.”

The NYT kept the story going, apparently suspicious because “Mr. McCain’s performance was well received.” Must have been cheating, right?

It was just a few months ago that we posted the chart above and similar ones on the parabolic increases in the price of oil. We had the feeling back then that things had gotten crazy and that prices were nearing a peak, but we were early. As one oil analyst noted, “Even if you are the only sane person in the asylum, there’s nothing you can do about” oil prices. But eventually things do change. Here’s that chart as of today, with the even steeper decline in natural gas prices in red.

If the free fall in natural gas prices is an indicator, oil prices should go much lower. We wonder what role, if any, control of oil or the oil price decline played in Russia’s timing of its Georgia invasion, since Gerogia’s strategic Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline is the sole “effective alternative to Russia’s pipeline network” and monopoly over supplies to certain parts of Europe.

And then there’s Iran’s OPEC governor trying as well to talk up the price of oil. We observe that there is a reasonable rationale for oil producers to be disciplined about restraining production when prices are going up every day; but when the prices start coming down, producers are incentivized to cheat and to produce more than they say they will, to squeeze out every bit of marginal revenue. We’ll just have to see if that happens this time.

It has been speculated that Vladimir Putin was behind the murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya in 2006. If so, he has some other reporters he might want to add to the list. Some Turkish reporters were almost killed by apparently undisciplined and trigger-happy Russian soldiers (who fortunately were also lousy shots). It just wouldn’t do to have that sort of bad publicity getting around.

The clandestinely filmed BBC report above seems to demonstrate that, contrary to Russian claims, its soldiers are not pulling out of some parts of Georgia at all. (On the other hand, there are reports from Georgian government sources that the Russians have begun to pull out of Gori.) One would think it is height of foolishness for the Russian government to lie about withdrawing from Georgia, since anyone with a cell phone or camcorder becomes a reporter who can expose the lie. That might be a few too many journalists to dispose of.

Nothing to see here folks. Move along now. ABC 7 in Denver:

The Denver coroner said Thursday a man found dead in a downtown hotel room with a pound of highly toxic sodium cyanide nearby died from cyanide poisoning. However, the medical examiner’s office could not say if 29-year-old Saleman Abdirahman Dirie, of Ottawa, Canada killed himself…

they found a bottle containing about a pound of the white powder, or between a pint and a quart by volume. An expert told the Denver Post that the amount of cyanide is enough to kill hundreds of people…

An online threat posted in July by a man with a similar name warned of death. The blog discussed the killing of Christians in Somalia by Islamists. The person who posted on the blog was a Muslim who appeared to condemn Christians. “Having the bible in one hand, and a bread in the other hand, is not a correct thing! Kill Them , Kill them, Kill them, that is my massage (sic),!” read the posting by Abdirahman Dirie on the ‘Solmali’s for Jesus’ Blog. It was not clear if Abdirahman Dirie and Saleman Abdirahman Dirie are the same person…

The last day of the DNC will be held at Invesco Field at Mile High, which is three miles away from the hotel…The FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force is assisting in the investigation but FBI spokeswoman Kathy Wright said the incident has no apparent connection to terrorism.

That’s nice. As we said, nothing to see here. HT: Polipundit

Iran’s OPEC governor Mohammad Ali Khatibi says that the oil market is oversupplied. Apparently he favors cutting production at OPEC’s next meeting in Vienna on September 9. WSJ:

“The market is oversupplied by at least 1 million barrels a day. If OPEC would like to remove this additional oil out of the market, then OPEC has to cut some production,” Khatibi said.

Questions: (a) how did we go from a permanent shortage of oil to a surplus in such a short time? (b) how is it possible for Congress and some Americans to want to be held hostage by the likes of Khatibi and his friends rather than using domestic resources that exist in abundance?

The WSJ reports on the unintended consequences of a government program (but is this in any way an appropriate job for the federal government?):

Congress created the national Protection and Advocacy for Individuals with Mental Illness program, or PAIMI, in 1986 to curb abuse and neglect of the mentally ill, primarily in institutions. In the 1960s and 1970s, many abuses were uncovered at hospitals, where patients were physically restrained, neglected or overmedicated. The PAIMI program, operated by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration with a 2008 budget of $34.8 million a year, funds protection-and-advocacy agencies in each state…

On June 20, 2006, William Bruce approached his mother as she worked at her desk at home and struck killing blows to her head with a hatchet. Two months earlier, William, a 24-year-old schizophrenic, had been released from Riverview Psychiatric Center in Augusta, Maine, against the recommendations of his doctors. “Very dangerous indeed for release to the community,” wrote one…

A few weeks after William Bruce’s admission, psychiatrist Jeffrey Fliesser wrote that William was hostile, paranoid and “dangerous to others without additional observation and active attempts to treat him,” an opinion he reiterated over the next five weeks. The doctor also wrote that he urged William, now diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, to take medication, but William refused…

the doctor’s notes also show that William’s release was backed by government-funded patient advocates. According to medical records, the advocates — none of them physicians — appear to have fought for his right to refuse treatment, to have coached him on how to answer doctors’ questions and to have resisted the medical staff’s efforts to contact his parents. As one doctor wrote, William told him his advocates believed he is “not a danger, and should be released.”…

Helen Bailey, one of William’s advocates, declined to discuss the details of his case but says the handling of it was consistent with her professional duties. “My job is to get the patient’s voice into the mix where decisions are made,” says Ms. Bailey, an attorney with Maine’s Disability Rights Center in Augusta. “No matter how psychotic, that voice is still worthy of being heard.”…

Ms. Bailey…doesn’t believe the advocates prevented William from getting medical care. “There is nothing in the William Bruce case that is contrary to the way we do business,” she says, adding that it is the hospital’s responsibility to try to have a patient committed or forcibly medicated. More generally, Ms. Bailey says it isn’t a given that families of the mentally ill should be involved in decisions involving their care. “There are some God damn nasty families out there,” she says…

There are, we suppose, always two sides to a story, but it’s hard to suspend judgment in this case. After William Bruce was arrested for killing his 47 year old mother, he “told a psychologist that the Pope told him to kill his mother because she was involved with al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.”

John Bolton writes in the Telegraph:

As bad as the bloodying of Georgia is, the broader consequences are worse. The United States fiddled while Georgia burned, not even reaching the right rhetorical level in its public statements until three days after the Russian invasion began, and not, at least to date, matching its rhetoric with anything even approximating decisive action. This pattern is the very definition of a paper tiger. Sending Secretary of State Condeleezza Rice to Tbilisi is touching, but hardly reassuring; dispatching humanitarian assistance is nothing more than we would have done if Georgia had been hit by a natural rather than a man-made disaster.

The European Union took the lead in diplomacy, with results approaching Neville Chamberlain’s moment in the spotlight at Munich: a ceasefire that failed to mention Georgia’s territorial integrity, and that all but gave Russia permission to continue its military operations as a “peacekeeping” force anywhere in Georgia. More troubling, over the long term, was that the EU saw its task as being mediator – its favourite role in the world – between Georgia and Russia, rather than an advocate for the victim of aggression.

Even this dismal performance was enough to relegate Nato to an entirely backstage role, while Russian tanks and planes slammed into a “faraway country”, as Chamberlain once observed so thoughtfully. In New York, paralysed by the prospect of a Russian veto, the UN Security Council, that Temple of the High-Minded, was as useless as it was during the Cold War. In fairness to Russia, it at least still seems to understand how to exercise power in the Council, which some other Permanent Members often appear to have forgotten…

Russia demonstrated unambiguously that it could have marched directly to Tbilisi and installed a puppet government before any Western leader was able to turn away from the Olympic Games. It could, presumably, do the same to them.

Fear was one reaction Russia wanted to provoke, and fear it has achieved, not just in the “Near Abroad” but in the capitals of Western Europe as well. But its main objective was hegemony, a hegemony it demonstrated by pledging to reconstruct Tskhinvali, the capital of its once and no-longer-future possession, South Ossetia. The contrast is stark: a real demonstration of using sticks and carrots, the kind that American and European diplomats only talk about.

Bolton concludes with a political point: “Obama has assiduously avoided specifics in foreign policy -– other than withdrawing speedily from Iraq –- but that luxury should no longer be available to him. We need to know if Obama’s reprise of George McGovern’s 1972 campaign theme, ‘Come home, America’, is really what our voters want, or if we remain willing to persevere in difficult circumstances.” But is that really the question at hand?

The WSJ sees China’s growth continuing…

Fixed-asset investment in urban areas between January and July rose 27.3% from a year earlier, the National Bureau of Statistics said Friday. The pace exceeded the first half’s 26.8% rise and the median 26.5% rise forecast…robust growth in investment and retail sales suggests economic growth will be resilient

…while the developed world sputters:

the European Union’s statistics agency said gross domestic product in the euro zone contracted 0.2% in the second quarter, the equivalent of a 0.8% annual rate of decline. It marked the first time since the early 1990s that GDP has fallen overall in the 15 countries that use the euro…The global weakness marks a sharp reversal of expectations for many corporations and investors, who at the year’s outset had predicted that major economies would remain largely insulated from America’s woes…

in a sign the world is dialing back its shopping spree of the past few years, the Baltic Dry Index, a measure of demand for shipping services, has fallen 37% since hitting a record on May 20, including a stretch of 23-straight down days…”The global economy is sputtering amidst a widening in the slowdown from the United States to Western Europe and Japan,” J.P. Morgan economist David Hensley said in a note to clients Wednesday. That slowdown, he said, “is feeding through to the emerging economies.”

If China’s growth is still 70% dependent on exports, as it was a couple of years ago, we wonder how it can continue to grow swiftly, as is currently predicted. Indeed, we are very skeptical, and find the “fixed-asset investment” explanation unpersuasive. “Fixed-asset expansion” quickly can become “overcapacity” in a time of reduced demand — the US was in the process of massive “fixed-asset expansion” in 1929, after all. In any event, we likely will be learning the answer soon.

The CFTC is catching on to the notion that there’s been some speculation in the oil market. WSJ:

Last month, the main U.S. regulator of commodities trading, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, reclassified a large unidentified oil trader as a “noncommercial” speculator. As a result, the number of futures and options contracts held by traders counted as speculators…rose to 49% of all crude-oil bets outstanding on the New York Mercantile Exchange, up from 38%.

The scale of the recent revision and questions about the reliability and transparency of data in this market are feeding into efforts by Congress to impose restrictions on energy trading. Four Democratic senators on Thursday called for an internal CFTC inspector-general investigation into the timing of a July 22 release of a report led by the agency. That report concluded speculators weren’t “systematically” driving oil prices. Oil prices soared until mid-July…

Talk about shutting the barn door after the horse is long gone. The spike started almost precisely a year ago when the hedge funds saw going long oil was a good way to short the dollar in the risk-free environment created by the Fed, and things got really crazy earlier this year as others piled on. Months ago oil traders and hedge fund managers detailed their findings about speculators in the market. It’s nice that the apparently blinkered CFTC appears to be catching up on the news.

The fellow who called drilling for our own oil “junk economics” and those who are proponents of such policies “stupid” seems to have a different view when it comes to other nations. NYT:

the war in Georgia isn’t that big a deal economically. But it does mark the end of the Pax Americana — the era in which the United States more or less maintained a monopoly on the use of military force. And that raises some real questions about the future of globalization.

Most obviously, Europe’s dependence on Russian energy, especially natural gas, now looks very dangerous — more dangerous, arguably, than its dependence on Middle Eastern oil. After all, Russia has already used gas as a weapon: in 2006, it cut off supplies to Ukraine amid a dispute over prices.

And if Russia is willing and able to use force to assert control over its self-declared sphere of influence, won’t others do the same?

Isn’t is vastly “more dangerous,” to quote Mr. Krugman’s piece above, for the nation enforcing what remains of the Pax Americana to be 70% dependent on its rivals and adversaries for its most important strategic resource? Ah, what’s the use…

Karl Rove says the election may come down to about four states. WSJ:

Mr. Obama is best positioned to pick up Colorado’s 9 electoral votes…The GOP now has just 68,507 more voters on the rolls in Colorado than Democrats, down from a 176,572 edge four years ago….McCain…needs to run up votes in the GOP strongholds of El Paso (Colorado Springs), Douglas (south of Denver), Weld (Eastern Plains) and Mesa (Western Slope) counties, while appealing to Democratic and independent Hispanics and Catholics.

The last time Virginia (13 electoral votes) went for a Democratic presidential candidate was 1964. In 2004, the GOP’s margin was eight points. That makes Virginia an uphill climb for Mr. Obama, but not out of reach. He’s focused on increasing African-American voters in Hampton Roads (in the southeastern corner of the state), Richmond and Petersburg, and on deepening his strength in Northern Virginia, where Fairfax was one of only 60 counties in America to flip from Republican in ‘00 to Democrat in ‘04…

With 17 electoral votes, Michigan is an attractive target. But it is also a complicated state. The Democratic machine is in near meltdown in Detroit, where the city’s mayor is fighting felony charges stemming from an alleged cover-up of a sex scandal (he recently spent a night in jail). The party is also hurt by adverse reactions to Democratic Gov. Jennifer Granholm’s $1.5 billion tax increase last year, which dampened economic growth. Mr. McCain needs Reagan Democrats and independents in eastern Michigan. These working class, culturally conservative, mostly Catholic voters are how the GOP elected an attorney general, a secretary of state and a state Senate majority…

Ohio. Ground zero in ‘04, its 20 electoral votes will be hotly contested again this year. No Republican has won the White House without winning the Buckeye State. How can Mr. McCain take Ohio? He can appeal to swing voters in the northeastern part of the state. Cuyahoga, Summit and Lucas counties and the Mahoning Valley are full of culturally conservative, working-class voters. In addition, Mr. Obama was wiped out in the primary among the blue-collar Reagan Democrats of southeastern Ohio. Outside of the university town of Athens, he won less than 30% of the vote in southeastern Ohio. This Appalachian region remains bad turf for him…

Mr. Obama needs to pick up 18 electoral votes more than John Kerry received, meaning Mr. Obama must carry Colorado or Virginia and add another small state to his column. If Mr. McCain carries Michigan as well as Ohio, it would make Mr. Obama’s Electoral College math very difficult.

Maybe it’s just us, but we found it hard to read this piece without thinking that Mr. Rove is making his suggestion on who McCain’s running mate should be.

The NYT reported that, in Georgia, “both sides appeared to take tentative steps to back away from further fighting and adhere to the framework of a cease-fire brokered on Wednesday,” but that Russia’s tough talk continued:

Russia’s president, Dmitri A. Medvedev, held a televised meeting with the leaders of the two breakaway regions, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and pledged that Russia would provide whatever they needed to secede lawfully from Georgia.

The Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, said separately in a radio interview that Georgia “can forget about” its territorial integrity because the Georgian government under President Mikheil Saakashvili had committed so many atrocities that the two breakaway regions could never live under Georgian rule.

Is this a return of the bad old days? Or is it a definitive response to repeated provocations by a blowhard? An awful lot of smart people seem to have reached firm conclusions on this matter, pro, con, and some version of both at the same time. Was it a smart move or an exercise in hubris?

We really don’t know the answers, because this is not Iraq, nor the Sudetenland, or any of the other back ends of metaphors that have been so easily offered. Let’s see what happens in the next period. Let’s see if and how the Russians withdraw. Let’s see, for example, what Gori looks like in a week or two before we propose long lists of ultimatums and sanctions. Is that unreasonable?

We looked at the issue of why there apparently a failure to anticipate the Russian attack on Georgia. Richard Beeston, the foreign editor of the London Times, says that MI5 knew:

The mini-war in Georgia may have surprised some Europeans, but it was expected weeks ago by British Intelligence. Thanks to the murder of Alexander Litvinenko, the ex-KGB officer who was poisoned in London by suspected Russian agents nearly two years ago, Britain has completely reassessed its relationship with Moscow.

MI5, which reports that Russian agents in Britain are now back at Cold War levels, regards Russia as the third most serious threat to British security after terrorism and nuclear proliferation. Attempts to rehabilitate relations have faltered and the recent treatment of BP by its partners and the Russian authorities has only reinforced the view that Russia cannot be trusted.

Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, said this: “Russia has been accused of using the conflict to try to topple the government and impose control over the country. This is palpable nonsense. Having established the safety of the region, the president has declared an end to military operations. Russia has no intention of annexing or occupying any part of Georgia and has again affirmed its respect for its sovereignty.” We’ll just have to see which perspective seems to comport more closely with the facts in the coming days.

In a number of countries around the world, the recommended caloric intake is 2000-2500 calories a day. They say that the average American consumes about 2800 calories a day, clearly overutilizing the earth’s precious resources. But some Americans are much, much worse than that. Here’s one who consumes 12,000 calories a day. NY Post:

Phelps lends a new spin to the phrase “Breakfast of Champions” by starting off his day by eating three fried-egg sandwiches loaded with cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, fried onions and mayonnaise. He follows that up with two cups of coffee, a five-egg omelet, a bowl of grits, three slices of French toast topped with powdered sugar and three chocolate-chip pancakes.

At lunch, Phelps gobbles up a pound of enriched pasta and two large ham and cheese sandwiches slathered with mayo on white bread - capping off the meal by chugging about 1,000 calories worth of energy drinks.

For dinner, Phelps really loads up on the carbs - what he needs to give him plenty of energy for his five-hours-a-day, six-days-a-week regimen - with a pound of pasta and an entire pizza. He washes all that down with another 1,000 calories worth of energy drinks.

It’s shocking that this much eating is still legal in the world. Americans are only 4% of the world population, and eating 12,000 calories a day is clearly not an environmentally responsible practice.

One of our presidential candidates said: “We can’t…eat as much as we want…and then just expect that every other country’s going say OK.” Hmmm — was he talking about the French?