Skip to main content

Qatar: is this the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand

Most will remember that the first world war "the Great War" if there was ever such a thing, started when the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated by a Serbian nationalist.  Honestly, the pump was primed long before the Archduke was killed, but it is generally recognized that it was the final straw that lead to a war -- "to end all wars".

What is going on in the Middle East is equally strange and creating some strange behaviors.  There is no doubt that Qatar (a tiny gas rich country) has been saying and doing things outside the norm, the PLO and Israel both had offices there, and because it shares gas fields with Iran it is far less of an enemy of Iran (Shia) than is Saudi Arabia (Sunni), the conflict for leadership of the region has been on-going for decades (BTW this is not the first time that things got ugly between Qatar and SA).

Trump hand seems to be involved by strongly supporting the Sunni (aka Saudi Arabia) and making comments about Iran and the Shia threat, there is a possible reason for conflict to arise between Qatar and SA.  Some will say that this is about oil/gas other say its about a US$ 1 billion ransom that Qatar paid to Iran (or to other players) for some fun loving prince abducted in Iraq while on a Falconing (SP) trip... There rumors that the reigning prince said that Hamas was the legitimate ruler of Palestine or that Iran was a calming influence in the region... As the FT said, it may have been planted in the news, but it does reflect general sentiments in Qatar -- that wants to be friends with all.

In fact, it matters little what the reasons are but the changing dynamics of the GCC (the Middle Eastern equivalent of NATO -- without the guns).  How can this end?  Well not well for Qatar that is certain.  Qatar has a tiny army (a reflection of a tiny country -- there are only about 100,000 Qatari citizen -- and about 3 million resident)  but the overall impact is important; Qatar is the location of one of America's largest military base...

And there's the other shoe.  Today, in less than 7 days after meeting the head of Qatar -- where everything was fantastic, great, well today the US of A dumped one of its allies and seem to be keen to topple that regime.  What does that say to America's other "friends"  watch out; "my word is not my bond", and in the case of Trump it is well know that even a contract is not a contract.

The important point here, is in sync with what Germany and France have been saying about the USA lately -- that it has become a fickle friend and that on that basis -- you should plan without it. Needless to say that in the past 15 days Trump has managed to unbalance two important groups; NATO and GCC -- not bad for two weeks of work.  It is far from clear that this was in reality Trump's objective, assuming that he has an objective.

One thing for sure, it was Trump that decided to ditch Article 5 of the NATO agreement -- this was not some mid level error, this was the decision of the commander in chief, for what reason, what's his bargaining chip -- again we don't know.  But America has become a destabilizing agent, the impact is hard to figure out because there are too many possible outcome.

Finally, more intersting news the $110 billion contract between Saudi Arabia and the US, is not a contract, its a bunch of letter of intents -- that have been around for years, the helicopter deal has been in the works since 2015 (Obama signed of that deal in 2015).  Its a wish list, there are no orders, just lots of MOU...

Fake news is really here, just didn't know it came out of the White House (HaHaHa)


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ok so I lied...a little (revised)

When we began looking at farming in 2013/14 as something we both wanted to do as a "second career" we invested time and money to understand what sector of farming was profitable.  A few things emerged, First, high-quality, source-proven, organic farm products consistently have much higher profit margins.  Secondly, transformation accounted for nearly 80% of total profits, and production and distribution accounted for 20% of profits: Farmers and retailers have low profit margins and the middle bits make all the money. A profitable farm operation needs to be involved in the transformation of its produce.  The low-hanging fruits: cheese and butter.  Milk, generates a profit margin of 5% to 8%, depending on milk quality.  Transformed into cheese and butter, and the profit margin rises to 40% (Taking into account all costs).  Second:  20% of a steer carcass is ground beef quality.  The price is low, because (a) a high percentage of the carcass, and (b) ground beef requires process
Post a Comment
Read more

21st century milk parlour

When we first looked at building our farm in 2018, we made a few money-saving decisions, the most important is that we purchased our milk herd from a retiring farmer and we also purchased his milking parlour equipment.  It was the right decision at the time.  The equipment dates from around 2004/05 and was perfectly serviceable, our installers replaced some tubing but otherwise, the milking parlour was in good shape.  It is a mature technology. Now, we are building a brand new milk parlour because our milking cows are moving from the old farm to the new farm.  So we are looking at brand new equipment this time because, after 20 years of daily service, the old cattle parlour's systems need to be replaced.  Fear not it will not be destroyed instead good chunks will end up on Facebook's marketplace and be sold to other farmers for spare parts or expansion of their current systems. All our cattle are chipped, nothing unusual there, we have sensors throughout the farm, and our milki
Post a Comment
Read more

So we sold surplus electricity one time last summer...(Update)

I guess that we will be buying an additional tank for our methane after all.   Over the past few months, we've had several electricity utilities/distributors which operate in our region come to the farm to "inspect our power plant facilities, to ensure they conform to their requirements".  This is entirely my fault.  Last summer we were accumulating too much methane for our tankage capacity, and so instead of selling the excess gas, that would have cost us some money, we (and I mean me) decided to produce excess electricity and sell it to the grid.  Because of all the rules and regulations, we had to specify our overall capacity and timing for the sale of electricity (our capacity is almost 200 Kw) which is a lot but more importantly, it's available 24/7, because it's gas powered.  It should be noted that the two generators are large because we burn methane and smaller generators are difficult to adapt to burn unconventional gas, plus they are advanced and can &qu
Post a Comment
Read more