Are we about to fall victim to one of the classic blunders? The most famous is never get involved in a land war in Asia,and only slightly less well-known is this: never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line.  And slightly behind that is underestimating the Russians facing a crisis.  As so eloquently expressed here, it seems like our current administration is being a bit complacent when it comes to the Russians.  We shouldn’t discount that Russia is going through a significant financial crisis:  foreign investment has fallen from $28B two years ago to barely a few billion, their stock markets have lost over 65% since last May, and Russians have pulled $280B out of their markets in fear of an imminent collapse.  There are a number of theories circulating in the west of how the Kremlin will respond but largely it’s viewed as an acceptance of the crisis…maybe much like Obama’s speech indicated yesterday for the U.S.  Maybe the largest contributor to this misconception that a Russian surrender to the financial crisis means that they won’t be a rising power anytime soon is that Russia doesn’t rely upon the same foundations of power that many countries in the west do.  After reading Volgi’s post again, take a jump over to the excellent assessment by Stratfor.

GorT

GorT is an eight-foot-tall robot from the 51ˢᵗ Century who routinely time-travels to steal expensive technology from the future and return it to the past for retroinvention. The profits from this pay all the Gormogons’ bills, including subsidizing this website. Some of the products he has introduced from the future include oven mitts, the Guinness widget, Oxy-Clean, and Dr. Pepper. Due to his immense cybernetic brain, GorT is able to produce a post in 0.023 seconds and research it in even less time. Only ’Puter spends less time on research. GorT speaks entirely in zeros and ones, but occasionally throws in a ڭ to annoy the Volgi. He is a massive proponent of science, technology, and energy development, and enjoys nothing more than taking the Czar’s more interesting scientific theories, going into the past, publishing them as his own, and then returning to take credit for them. He is the only Gormogon who is capable of doing math. Possessed of incredible strength, he understands the awesome responsibility that follows and only uses it to hurt people.