[Sixstrings]

More to the point of "the whole world is not enough for NATO" -- nato really never wanted to expand. It was Poland and the east euros that kept wanting in and finally the West said yes.

It's not that nato wants to grow, *it's that people are afraid of Russia and do not trust their neighbor to never invade them*.

That's why Ukraine jumped into our lap. They want away from Moscow control, and the US and nato is the only defense against that.

So -- nato doesn't want to expand, it just keeps getting asked in.

At some point it is going too far and you see this with even Ukraine -- really, Europe isn't sure they want it.

If Belarus has a color revolution in a few years, then nato and the West will have another decision to make and what to do about them. Do you just abandon people waving EU and American flags, do you just stand there and watch a dictator roll the tanks in? Or Moscow roll tanks?

[AndyA]

LOL Sixstrings, still deluded about a supposed annexation. I'd like to see what kind of reception you get if you were to propose to those annexed crimeans that the good guys were coming to the rescue, and free them from the Russians. LOL. Having trouble accepting the fact that the vast majority of Crimeans voted to join Russia, and are actually happy? Next you'll be telling us how Putin ordered his troops to throw babies out of incubators, and then stealing the incubators. LOL, ahh you make me laugh, paranoid about Russia attacking the US, oh yeah lets not forget the Russians have put their troops on NATO's doorstep. They should be more like the vassal state of Germany and have no military, do as they are told even when it goes against their own interests.

[ROCKMAN]

"Lowest price in 4 years. All the stuff that wasn't supposed to "work out" -- shale, tar sands, LNG transport, EVs -- has, in fact "worked out." I suppose that depends on how one defines "worked out". So the lowest price in 4 years...and that price was the highest inflation adjusted price (excluding the short lived spike of '08) in the previous 34 years. And now that those rate increase components just lost about 20% of their price support lets see where production is 4 years from today.

As Dr. Phil would ask: "How's that working for you?" LOL.

[Kylon]

Concerning cyberwarfare-

I once watched a speech by a Intel Corporation president, who said that they used Russian programmers, because Russian programmers were the best in the world. The reason that Russian programmers were the best in the world, was that Russian computers were so bad, that they had to become very efficient and effective with their programming skills and abilities in order to make programs that could efficiently operate on those slow computers.

At this point if the Russians wanted a supercomputer for cyber warfare they could possibly buy one from the Chinese, or use a large number of slower computers with parallel processing.

They might still have the programming supremacy, and hence their hacking ability may be better.

However, the United States does have a great deal of influence over the internet, and it may have created a large number of backdoors into many different types of commonly used software. So even if the United States couldn't target the Russian State, they could still harass and attack the Russian economy that the everyday person operates in. This would cause problems temporarily for the Russians, would backfire and destroy the United States software industry, and ultimately marginalize the United States though, as other countries would see buying U.S software as a defense liability rather than an economic asset.

The BRICS countries are already creating a bypass to the fiber optic cables that flow into the United States to avoid being spied on. Should the United States start targeting other countries through built in backdoors in software, other countries might ban software from the United States.

[radon1]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Sixstrings', 'M')ore to the point of "the whole world is not enough for NATO" -- nato really never wanted to expand. It was Poland and the east euros that kept wanting in and finally the West said yes.