Appalachian Basin’s Marcellus – the new target

a technical paper from Penn State and SUNY-Fredonia, estimating original gas in place at 168-516 Tcf and recoverable reserves of as much as 50 Tcf, got picked up by USA Today.

Several of the major independents, including Range Resources (RRC) and Chesapeake Energy (CHK), have large acreage positions and drilling programs. Among the smaller independents, the most relatively outsized acreage positions include those of Atlas Energy Resources (ATN), Cabot Oil & Gas (COG), Linn Energy (LINE), Exco Resources (XCO), and Rex Energy (REXX). Essentially all the participants are reporting good-to-excellent results from increasingly aggressive capex programs, including horizontal drilling.

RRC has 650,000 net acres in the play out of 1.1M acres in the Marcellus trend and estimates its net unrisked reserve potential at 10-15 Tcf.

The Williston Basin

The Williston Basin is a sedimentary basin centred near Williston, North Dakota, which underlies some 250,000 km2 in North Dakota, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Montana and South Dakota

Important reserves of petroleum have been developed in the Williston Basin; many of the producing oil pools are located in southeastern Saskatchewan. Lignite coal in the near-surface Tertiary rocks is mined in Saskatchewan and North Dakota; deeply buried potash beds may be exploited in the future.

THE CENTRE CANNOT HOLD

http://en.rian.ru/russia/20080311/101113008.html

I ran across this unusual article a couple of days ago.

It comes from RIA Novosti news services. The RIA Novosti is a very slick, well financed Russian news agency that disseminates the "party line".

These are some of the facts which precede this story.

1. US troops in Afghanistan are at the end of a very long supply line. The US uses the shortest highway, generally referred to as the Indus Highway, which runs 777 miles from the coastal town of Karachi to Peshawar, near the Kyber Pass. It runs at least half it's distance through the heart of "the pakistani-taliban" country in the Northwest Territories and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. 70% of US/NATO supplies come in by truck including the fuel needed to run the NATO troops - 500,000 gallons per day - up this highway. This supply line is under increasing attack

2. Pakistan becomes more unstable by the day. The US has begun cross border attacks into Pakistan against "the pakistani-taliban" strongholds in the Tribal Areas. These attacks are widely condemned by the Pakistan military. As a result, the "pakistani-taliban" has launched a war against the Pakistan military and Pakistan in general. How long before this supply gets shut down?

3. The US has been looking for an alternative northern supply line since at least last December, with no success.

4. At one time, the US had a large base in southern Uzbekistan but lost it because it complained about a notorious government massacre in Andijon, UZ in 2005.

5. The Germans have the use of a base in Termez, Uz. In the last few days, Uzbekistan had agreed to allow limited numbers of U.S. staff to use the facility at Termez as long as they fly on German planes. After 3 or 4 months of effort this is all we have and it is far from a supply line.

When I first saw the article, I tried to confirm it with Reuters or APF, but finding no other articles in the western press, I dismissed it.

Later, I found reference to it on a Serbian website Pthat is uncontrollably angry over Kosovo. They were gloating over NATO's Afghanistan predicament.

That website referenced this guy, who writes for a Canadian Military Magazine.
,
http://www.espritdecorps.ca/Ontarget%20080312.htm

Am I correct with these conclusions?

1. First, the US news black out gets deeper and deeper and and more glaringly obvious.

2. The NATO situation in Afghanistan is deteriorating and some factions are looking for Russia to bail them out.

3. It is Russia who ultimately determines who uses the Central Asian airspace and the price they are demanding is a NATO-CSTO treaty.

4. This comes just before the big NATO conference where the US is pushing hard for NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia with Russia pushing back extremely hard against such a proposition.

LINKS

The creation and deployment of coups of any kind requires agents on the ground. The main handler of these coups on the "street side" has been the Albert Einstein Institution, which was formed in 1983 as an offshoot of Harvard University under the impetus of Dr. Gene Sharp, and which specializes in "non violence as a form of warfare."

Helvey "was an officer of the Defence Intelligence Agency of the Pentagon, who had served in Vietnam and, subsequently, as the US Defence Attaché in Yangon, Myanmar (1983 to 85), during which he clandestinely organized the Myanmarese students to work behind Aung San Suu Kyi and in collaboration with Bo Mya's Karen insurgent group....He also trained in Hong Kong the student leaders from Beijing in mass demonstration techniques which they were to subsequently use in the Tiananmen Square incident of June, 1989" and "is now believed to be acting as an adviser to the Falun Gong, the religious sect of China,

President Fernando Marcos of the Philippines in 1986,

Solidarity

(Polish: Solidarność (help·info); full name: Independent Self-governing Trade Union "Solidarity" — Niezależny Samorządny Związek Zawodowy "Solidarność") is a Polish trade union federation founded in September 1980 at the then Lenin Shipyards, and originally led by Lech Wałęsa.

The Roundtable Talks between the weakened government and Solidarity-led opposition led to semi-free elections in 1989. By the end of August a Solidarity-led coalition government was formed and in December Wałęsa was elected President of Poland.

the Tiananmen Square destabilization in 1989

The Revolutions of 1989, sometimes called the Autumn of Nations

The "Velvet Revolution"

The "Velvet Revolution" (Czech: sametová revoluce, Slovak: nežná revolúcia) (November 16 – December 29, 1989) refers to a non-violent revolution in Czechoslovakia that saw the overthrow of the Communist government there;[1] it is seen as one of the most important of the Revolutions of 1989.

By November 20 the number of peaceful protesters assembled in Prague had swelled from 200,000 the previous day to an estimated half-million. A two-hour general strike, involving all citizens of Czechoslovakia, was held on November 27.

Alexander Dubček was elected speaker of the federal parliament on December 28 and Václav Havel the President of Czechoslovakia on December 29, 1989.



Introduction: Nonviolence versus a Dictatorship

Robert Helvey's Expert Political Defiance

December 1985: The Independent Peace Movements in Eastern Europe. By

March 1985: You Can't Always Get What You Want. By Metta Spencer

Burma's Nonviolent Struggle

http://metta-spencer.blogspot.com/

Buddhist Peacemakers

A
Selected Bibliography

The aim of this website is to promote understanding of and research on civil resistance -

RED SQUARE FIREWALL

SOURCE

Kremlin strategists

• Gleb Pavlovsky,

• Sergei Markov and

• Vyacheslav Nikonov

all gave speeches to the Nashi camp at Lake Seliger outside Moscow (as did, notably, leading Kremlin-backed presidential contenders Sergei Ivanov and Dmitriy Medvedev). Two years ago, following the uprising in Ukraine, Pavlovsky and co. were charged with making sure the orange tide never reached Red Square. One of the first things they did was establish Nashi - the name means "Ours" - to counter the pro-Western youth groups like

• Ukraine's Pora that formed the backbone of the revolutions that hit

• Serbia in 2000,

• Georgia in 2003 and

• Ukraine a year later.

The BBC crackdown is linked because Pavlovsky, Markov and Nikonov understand that anti-government media - namely

• B-92 radio in Serbia, the

• Rustavi-2 television station in Georgia and

• Ukraine's Fifth Channel -

were perhaps even more important than the youth groups in bringing Serbs, Georgians and Ukrainians into the streets.

While I'm quite cynical about the kind of "reporting" Fifth Channel did during the Orange Revolution - it wasn't so much as covering political events as inciting them -

W. Shedd said...

There is no doubt that NGO's funded by Western governments have fueled political dissent, this has been documented endlessly. We wouldn't accept such actions within our own country; in fact, our laws specifically prohibit foreign governments from taking such actions, via NGOs or lobbyists. So, we, the US and Western nations, took advantage of the former openness of Russian and CIS laws and regulations. Russia has had to change laws in the face of this and attempted to control dialogue and news and insert young people on the street.

In a sense, these are war-time measures for Russia. The West has been assaulting Russia for years now, in a soft campaign, attempting to dismantle the country in order to profit and disarm that nation further. Neo-con's click their heels in glee at the prospect of Russia being divided into a dozen smaller, less powerful nations.

SOURCE

Nashi (the word means "Ours") are the creation of

• Vladislav Surkov, Putin's deputy chief of staff and

• powerful Kremlin spin doctor Gleb Pavlovsky.

Charged in the wake of Ukraine's Orange Revolution with making sure revolutionary tents were never pitched on Red Square, the two decided to implement strict new restrictions on Western NGOs (read Surkov's paranoid secret speech on NGOs and conspiracies against Russia here). Then they created Nashi, a group they hoped would serve as a counterweight to rabble-rousing pro-Western groups like

• "grape revolution" in Molvova

• Saffron Revolution in Myanmar

• KelKel is a youth movement in Kyrgyzstan

• Mjaft in Albania

• Zubr in Belarus, or "Jeans Revolution" revolution

• Sksela in Armenia

• Optor in Serbia (Resistance)
  

• Kmara in Georgia, (Enough!)
  

• Pora in Ukraine and now (It is Time)
  

• Oborona in Russia.

Today the group claims to have tens of thousands of members.

Anatomy of a Revolution

SOME STRATEGIC ADVICE FOR GENE SHARP AND HIS "MENSHEVIKS", STEPHEN ZUNES AND ARTHUR D EDELSTEIN

FIRST OF ALL:

Boris Berezovsky wants his money back

NOW, FOR THE ADVICE:

Ultimately, the revolutions we remember are the ones that earn labels, the ones that come to symbolize great changes of epoch, like the ‘springtime of nations’ in 1848 or the Iranian ‘Islamic revolution’ in 1979.

that Ukrainian voters would initially have forgiven a lot economically, if the first two Orange governments had done more to cleanse the system of such fraud, fakery, and corruption. Instead, they put economics before politics,

Fake parties were much less successful the second time around. Ukrainian voters have wised up to ‘big board parties’, whose million-dollar budgets made minimal impacts.

Future historians will continue to write of the ‘Orange Revolution’, if 2004 acquires adjectives beyond mere color, i.e., if the changes in Ukraine come to be seen as a turning point in the region, after which politics moved away from the ‘technology’ of trickery and actually began to improve people’s lives.

So far, negative lessons and the spread of counter-technology have been more apparent.

new counter-revolutionary ‘technologies’. The authorities prevented any meaningful parallel count or exit poll that might have served to set off an ‘electoral revolution’.

They also made it difficult for the opposition to replicate the tactics of ‘strategic non-violence’ advocated by the likes of Gene Sharp, by maintaining a united front and cutting off communication with potential hinterlands of civic support.

Political Technologist like Gleb Pavlovsky and Vladislav Surkov will apply FDTD in reverse. Anyone can do what Helvey does. After all, there is no principle involved and really no brains. All it takes is the backing of a government and an unlimited budget.

Russia will create Nashi.

China will criminalize the Gulan Fong

Belarus will have voters who witnessed how the standards of living of their Russian neighbors declined when Boris Yeltsin "liberalized" the country. They will not believe in the western illusion and they will want to avoid this painful experience in their country.

In other words, nonviolence as a strategic or pragmatic decision, without principles or moral commitment, designed to sell a country out to the "Neo-liberal Economic system of the West"
for rape, pillage and plunder will only work so many times and it appears that your time is up.

ARTICLE

GENE SHARP, MASTER OF NONVIOLENT WARFARE
Adam Larson

• It’s worthy of note both the admission that these ideas represented a weapons system, and that as with other weapons systems, it is initially morally couched as purely defensive in nature.

• – he sought not so much to stop wars as to achieve their goals by other means.

• The book was called Gandhi Wields the Weapon of Moral Power, yet Sharp rejected the spiritual core of that moral power. In a 2005 interview he explained his research into Gandhi’s struggle was based “not [on] pacifism, not on any mahatma nonsense, but on pragmatic nonviolent struggle.” [7]

• in 1993 he released an early version of his most widely-read book, From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation (abbreviated FDTD). The book was first published not in English, but in the four major Burmese dialects

• The book was also put to use in existing US-sponsored tactical training of Burmese opposition forces, a case we’ll look at below.

• the book served widely as a handbook for all the peoples of Eastern Europe, Central or East Asia and Latin America emerging from Communist oppression or hoping to emerge from any other oppression that was disfavored in Washington.

• Whatever his original intentions in this endeavor, Sharp wound up designing a template for what journalist Jonathan Mowat would later come to call “the postmodern coup d'etat,” one that sneaks in under cover of a people’s movement. [10]

• a disintegrating Yugoslavia which had just whethered two separate NATO bombing campaigns and tightening UN sanctions. Since Sharp's notions were finally used there to finish what the bombs had begun, the "post-military" descriptor takes on a less phiolosophical, more tactical quality. It's not about warfare in a weaponless world, it's about the warfare the commences post-militarily - when the actual bombing is done.

• The president of the Albert Einstein Institution as of 2006 is retired US Army Colonel Robert Helvey, a longtime proponent of Sharp’s theories. More than anyone else it has been Helvey who has weaponized his mentor’s ideas of nonviolent conflict and put it to use in the field.

GENE SHARP, ALBERT EINSTEIN INSTITUTE AND THE WEAPONIZING OF NONVIOLENCE

SourceWatch

The Albert Einstein Institution (AEI) has played the key role in recent years in training and deploying youth movements to help prepare the conditions for coups through fostering the impression that the targeted regimes are deeply unpopular, and through destabilizing those regimes through their demonstrations and the like. The group, which is funded by the Soros foundations and the US government, is led by former DIA officer Col. Robert Helvey, and Harvard University's Dr. Gene Sharp.[Mowat, [2]]

Swarming Adolescents

The creation and deployment of coups of any kind requires agents on the ground. The main handler of these coups on the "street side" has been the Albert Einstein Institution, which was formed in 1983 as an offshot of Harvard University under the impetus of Dr. Gene Sharp, and which specializes in "nonviolence as a form of warfare." Dr. Sharp had been the executive secretary of A.J. Muste, the famous U.S. Trotskyite labor organizer and peacenik. The group is funded by Soros and the NED. Albert Einstein's president is Col. Robert Helvey, a former US Army officer with 30 years of experience in Southeast Asia. He has served as the case officer for youth groups active in the Balkans and Eastern Europe since at least 1999.

. . . He also trained in Hong Kong the student leaders from Beijing in mass demonstration techniques which they were to subsequently use in the Tiananmen Square incident of June 1989" and "is now believed to be acting as an adviser to the Falun Gong, the religious sect of China, in similar civil disobedience techniques." Col. Helvey nominally retired from the army in 1991, but had been working with Albert Einstein and Soros long before then.[3]

Col. Helvey and his colleagues have created a series of youth movements including Otpor! in Serbia, Kmara! in Georgia, Pora! in Ukraine, and the like, which are already virally replicating other sects throughout the former Soviet Union, achieving in civilian form what had not been possible militarily in the 1980s. The groups are also spreading to Africa and South America.[ibid.]

The Palestinian Nonviolent Movement
...Another speaker reported that for most Palestinians, nonviolence is a strategic or pragmatic decision (as advocated by Gene Sharp of the Albert Einstein Institute), not a principled or moral commitment (as with Gandhi or MLK Jr.).

WAR ON HUGO CHAVEZ
"Sharp has spoken to Alonso but declined to comment about the Guarimba, saying he doesn't know its architect or the plan well enough. He says the Albert Einstein Institution, a small Boston-based think tank that he runs, doesn't offer advice to budding revolutionaries. "We don't tell people what they do," he says. "If they find our work relevant, well, here it is."

OTHER ARTICLES

Soft and Undercover Coups d’État

The dictator slayer

East Boston's Gene Sharp is soft-spoken, but he makes bad guys from Caracas to Beijing cringe

By ADAM REILLY

Engineering Democracy
The new Gladio in action?
Ukrainian postmodern coup completes testing of new template
By Jonathan Mowat

GENE SHARP, MASTER OF NONVIOLENT WARFARE

SOME NOTES ON TIMING AND CONSENT
ROOFIES FOR REVOLUTION?
Adam Larson

AUTHORITARIAN CAPITALISM

The liberal democratic camp defeated its authoritarian, Fascist and Communist rivals alike in all of the three major great-power struggles of the 20th century - the two world wars and the Cold War.

The Soviet Union failed because its economic systems limited it. But the nondemocratic capitalist great powers, Germany and Japan, were defeated in war fundamentally because they were medium-sized countries with limited resource bases.

the power of the United States consistently surpassed that of the next two strongest states combined throughout the 20th century, and this decisively tilted the global balance of power in favor of whichever side Washington was on.

By shifting from Communist command economy to capitalism, China and Russia have switched to a far more efficient brand of authoritarianism.

holding considerably more power than any of the democracies' past rivals ever did by virtue of being both large and capitalist.