(January 28, 2015 at 8:37 am)Creed of Heresy Wrote: But anyway, Putin. You're not the US. You can't get away with interfering in politics outside of your own country by force anymore.I think that even the US (aside from the far-right) is realizing that it cannot do that anymore either. It costs too much, even for a nation that still has a lot of wealth to buffer bad decisions. That does not seem to be the case with Russia, though I am admittedly ignorant of much of their recent goings-on. If they're really that dependent on oil to keep their economy from collapsing, then they might be the real target of OPEC's decision to keep up supply at the expense of cost-per-barrel.
Doesn't Russia supply a pretty large amount of the natural gas used by Europe? How might Russia's economic problems affect the price and delivery of energy to Europe? And does Putin see it as a way to keep his country from going over the cliff-- basically ransoming energy to his neighbors in a last-ditch effort to keep enough money flowing and the ruble from becoming toilet paper?
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
