INSTC - International North–South Transport Corridor

International North–South Transport Corridor

This is a curious story:

In Asia, New Wars Are Opening Long-Dreamed-of Routes by Emanuel Pietrobon

He lays out the problems with the current shipping route from India to Moscow. He spends some time talking about the possibility of shipping across the arctic ocean since it is now possible. And then he talks about the INSTC (International North–South Transport Corridor). It's much shorter and possibly quicker and cheaper as well, except, well, there are a couple of problems they are going to have to deal with:

The average cost of shipping a container from Mumbai to Moscow is around $3,000 via the Suez route but could drop to approximately $2,000 using the INSTC. However, political tensions and regional instability pose risks, and infrastructure development is still needed to fully untap its potential. Huge investments and huge diplomatic efforts are mandatory to make all the INSTC's stops safe, and thus attractive for want-to-be investors and merchants: Azerbaijan and Armenia must settle the Karabakh issue once and for all, India and Pakistan must solve the Kashmir question, and Israel and Iran must find a modus vivendi.

Modus vivendi is a Latin phrase that means "mode of living" or "way of life". In international relations, it often is used to mean an arrangement or agreement that allows conflicting parties to coexist in peace.

So there are only three intractable problems that will need to be solved. Somehow, I don't think that's going to happen, but with enough money I suppose anything is possible.

 

Cruise Missile Fly-by

Fishman Captures 2 Cruise Missles while in Caspian Sea
JustSayYourLines

Good day to be out on the water.

Caspian Sea

The Caspian Sea is about 700 miles north to south and roughly 200 miles across. This image is in the normal orientation, that is north is at the top and south is at the bottom. Going clockwise from the bottom it is bordered by Iran, Azerbaijan, Russia, Kazakhastan and Turkmenistan. I don't know who's shooting at who, but I'll bet Azerbaijan is involved. That's where Baku, the oil town, is.

VIVANT

『VIVANT』キャスト最新ビジュアル公開！遂に､本当の冒険物語が幕を開ける―第3話 7/30(日)よる9時【TBS】
TBS公式 YouTuboo

VIVANT is a goofball action comedy. A Japanese corporation makes an error in transferring funds to the fictional country of Balka. Nogi, the salaryman who pressed the Enter key that activated the transfer, gets blamed for the error and is sent to Balka to retrieve the missing $90 million. Balka is somewhere in central Asia, between China, Russia, Mongolia and Kazakhstan. The scenery is spectacular. Nogi bumbles along and survives only because other people look out for him. Nogi's facial expressions are very entertaining. Nobody knows what VIVANT means, the best they have been to work out so far is that it might be a mispronunciation of the Japanese word for annex. 10 episodes, an hour and a half each. We've only watched the first one.

Two days later and we've watched 8 of the 10 episodes and they're mostly like 45 minutes long. I think only the first episode was extra long. Anyway, this show is a real smorgasbord. We've got heart warming scenes, that go on for so long I was beginning to think this was a soap opera. We have scenes of brutal violence, and deliberate cruelty. We have cynical conspiracy mongering or stunning expose of what is actually going on in the world, depending if you are wearing a tin foil hat or not. And then there's the day-to-day activities going on in civilian spaces where everyone is pretending to be nice people. My gawd, it's just like real life. Scary if you think about it.

Gold Bars

Gold bars
Central Bank of Uzbekistan

Seems Utah and Nevada aren't the only ones worried about the ephemeral nature of paper money. 

Uzbekistan has appeared here a surprising number of times. 

Just for grins, here's a painting from the Wikipedia article about Uzbekistan:

Triumphant crowd at Registan, Sher-Dor Madrasah. The Emir of Bukhara viewing the severed heads of Russian soldiers on poles. Painting by Vasily Vereshchagin (1872).

Via Tyler Durden at ZeroHedge

Map of the Day

Aral Sea in 1984

Google Earth Engine has satellite imagery dating back to 1984. They have time lapse shows of a number of locations on Earth, including the desiccation of the Aral Sea, one of my favorite examples of big government run amok.

Via Detroit Steve

Conspiracies Я Us

Tashkent, Uzbekistan

I follow a bunch of blogs on feedly, some of them I read, some I just look at the pictures, some I skip over when they get too long winded for me. Most of them seem to be written by ordinary folks who happen to have access to a keyboard and the internet. Yesterday I came across one post about the Corona Virus that agrees with my view of the situation, and in this post I came across this passage:

". . . which mysteriously appeared at precisely the time the UK and US governments were desperately trying to get rid of me as Ambassador, just a couple of weeks after I had been finally cleared of all the false charges with which the British government had attempted to fit me up."

and I think 'who is this guy'? This guy is Craig Murray, former Ambassador from England to Uzbekistan. What a job, a diplomatic posting to the back of beyond. How do you manage to stir up so much shit from the middle of nowhere? He must be an energetic guy to get so many people mad at him. Anyway, from what I've read, he seems to have a brain in his head, so we seem to be mostly in agreement.

But then I thought about his call for restraint in media, for them to stop blowing this whole thing out of proportion, and I thought - who are you kidding? Asking social media to exercise restraint is like going outside in a hurricane and telling it to stop blowing.

Now my wife just told me that the NBA has cancelled the rest of the basketball season, and Trump has canceled all travel to Europe, and now my spider sense is tingling. Either somebody knows something they aren't telling, or somebody engineered this. Not the disease, any disease would do, what they engineered was the social response in hopes of shutting down the economy. The Illuminati are no doubt behind this. Who are the Illuminati? Nobody that anybody knows. Bunch of guys in a nondescript office on Wall Street, calculating the odds and placing their bets on the stock market, no doubt shorting most everything except Purell and TP. Probably got their start in social media engineering with one of social justice campaigns of the last few years. Probably lent out their expertise to the Democrats and Republicans for their political campaigns. And now they have created the perfect storm and they are going to make a killing on the stock market.

BakraOnline.pk

Big Eid ul Adha Animals

Got a comment on an old post. Comment didn't say much, but given the topic (hex arithmetic in Google spreadsheets), I wondered who it was. Silly me. It was spam for a Pakistani website. I think their text blurb says it best:

Buy Bakra, Dumba, Goat, Cow, bull, Camel for sacrifice at Eid ul Azha for qurbani in Pakistan from online bakra mandi. This time Eid-ul-Adha will be on 12th Septermber, 2016 on Friday. Muslims will sacrifice animals on 1st, 2nd or 3rd day of Eid Qurbani in the remembrance of great sacrifice of Prophet Ibrahim Alaihis Salam. On this day, muslims sacrifice their animals and devide in poor people around them. This website provide you easy way to do qurbani even for Pakistani's living outside Pakistan in foreign countires like USA, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia, Europe, India, Japan, China, France, Italy, Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, Belgium, Hong Kong etc. Overseas Pakistan can book their animal online and we can deliver animal to their provided address or nominated charities in Pakistan. We have VIP animals for sale from special bakra farm house at this speciall occassion of Eid. You can select animals after viewing pics or on the basis of weight. We congratulate all people of Pakistan from Islamabad, Lahore, Karachi, Rawalpindi, Multan, Gujranwala, Bahawalpur, Faisalabad, Sargodha, Sahiwal, Dera Ghazi Khan, Peshawar, DI Khan, Swat, Kohat, Malakand, Abbottabad, Mardan, Bannu, Sukkur, Hyderabad, Aga Khan, Larkana, AJK, Mirpur Khas, Quetta and other cities on this special day of Eid Qurbani 2016.

I always wondered what became of the bodies of those sacrificed to the gods. In ancient times I suspect they were left for the gods or their minions to do with as they saw fit, which was probably for the best, being as you don't wanna be messin' with gods, being as they are all godlike and shit.
    But once you have cities and some level of civilization, you probably don't want to leave dead bodies lying around. Maybe burn them or donate them to the poor. Perhaps that was what the novices did. While the upper echelon of the priests were making nice with the rich, their underlings were supplementing their meager earnings by shoveling the bodies out the back door onto meat wagons.
    Anyway, it looks the bodies of these sacrificial animals are going to the poor.

Girls with Guns

Peshawar, Pakistan, January 27, 2015. Teachers check out guns during a training session. 
A month after terrorist attack on an army-run school in Peshawar, authorities have commenced special gun training sessions for female teachers in the city on Tuesday. 
(Xinhua/Umar Qayyum)

Bike of the Day

A soldier escorts school children on motorbike after they were rescued from the school that is under attack by militant gunmen in northwest Pakistan's Peshawar, Dec. 16, 2014.

The Road Across the Top of the World

Chinese Border Gate with Pakistan at Khunjerab Pass, 15,500 feet elevation.

China and Pakistan have signed a deal to develop an 'economic corridor' from Kashgar, China to Karachi. There is a road between the two countries now, but it's is not what you would call a highway.

With the 'stans getting all the press these days, I wasn't even aware that Pakistan shared a border with China. Of course it's not like an army is going to come flooding across the border.

Khunjerab Pass

At least not until they get the highway built. This isn't China's only project. They seem to be intent on rebuilding the entire 3rd world.

Saudi Arabia & Islam Versus Communism & Communists

Kabul, Afghanistan

Saudi Arabia plans to start construction on a new mosque in Kabul.

King Faisal Mosque in Islamabad

The rest of this is from 2012. Sometimes it takes me a while to catch on. Rumor has it that it will be similar to this one that they built in Islamabad.

What does Saudi Arabia care about Afghanistan? A vacuum draws all kinds of opportunists.

Afghanistan is an ideal springboard and battleground for the spread of Saudi Sunni Wahhabism and Iranian Shiite fundamentalism throughout Central Asia; especially out towards the former Soviet breakaway nations that are hungry for any teaching necessary to fill the failed Bolshevik indoctrination vacuum; especially any form of Islam.- Khalil NOURI November 2012

Mecca, Saudi Arabia, October 16, 2013.  The Clock Tower and the Grand Mosque. AFP PHOTO/FAYEZ NURELDINE

 The new mosque will be big, but it cannot hold a candle to the Saudi clock tower in Mecca.

Moderate Moslems, i.e. Westernized or civilized Moslems, need to start differentiating themselves from the terrorist Moslems. As long as both groups are claiming to be Moslems (or is it Muslims? I can never keep the politically correct lingo straight.), there is going to be confusion. Some people will take the time to determine what kind of Musselman a person is. Some people would prefer to just shoot them all and let God, sorry, Allah, sort them out.

All we really need is a new name for one or both sides of the fence. You know, Democrats and Republicans are both capitalists, although you can be forgiven for forgetting that essential element. They make such a big stink about not being like the other guys. And then there are capitalists and communists, though they are getting hard to tell apart. So what can we call these two major factions of Islam? Mudders and Brudders? Mummers and Bombers? Mohammadinians and Abuhasinians? Philistines and Pharaohs? Okay, maybe these aren't too good, but you get the idea, and somehow we need to get these two sides of the fence to start using these new terms. Otherwise someone who can't tell them apart is liable to get pissed off and nuke Mecca. During the haj.

More Rockets

Kazakhstan, Nov. 21, 2014. Russia's Soyuz-FG booster rocket with the space capsule Soyuz TMA-15M that will carry a new crew to the International Space Station (ISS), being prepared for launch at the pad in Russian leased Baikonur cosmodrome. Start of the new Soyuz mission is scheduled on Monday, Nov.24.(AP Photo/Dmitry Lovetsky)

Lot's of rockets going up this week. We won't even mention Pakistan's.

Zahedan, Iran

Colorful buildings in the light industrial suburb southeast of town.

Seems Iran is having their own trouble with ISIS, which is either ironic (Iranic?), funny, or disturbing. I'm not sure which. The dateline on the story says Zahedan, Iran, which is 25 miles from the point where Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan all meet. When you look at the satellite image of most towns that are in the desert the terrain looks pretty bleak. But if you zoom in enough eventually you find evidence of water and some green crops. Not so here. Sand, rocks and buildings was all I could see. Then I notice these blue dots south of the airport. That's weird. What are they? Could they be swimming pools in a rich folk's enclave? Zoom in closer and I see that they are the brightly colored roofs of buildings, which strikes me as really weird. Even weirder than the US and Iran being on the same side. There are half a million people living here and the amount of irrigated cropland is miniscule.

Chechen Dragon Rug

Caucasian Kazak Dragon rug with Yellow Ground

Martin Smith Cruz covers a lot of central Russia in Stalin's Ghost including Tver, where the Russian's stopped the German advance on Moscow, and Chechnya, site of recent wars. In the book (it's fiction) there was some kind of an incident in Chechnya that just didn't smell right, and so Arkady, our hero, has to keep poking at it until he figures out what happened. What happened was that the villain, a Russian officer, was trading with the enemy. He was buying Chechen Dragon Rugs from the rebels and, like so many illegal transactions, something went sour and a bunch of people ended up dead.
    I'm wondering if Chechan dragon rugs are a real thing so I check, and, yes, they are. The one in the picture above is valued somewhere north of $10,000. That's in the USA. In Chechnya with a war going on rug merchants could probably pick one up from a refugee for considerably less.

Here's a story about the rug business written between the first and second Chechen wars. I found it on Guide to Caucasian Rugs.

Going Up

 Cape Canaveral, Florida, September 21, 2014. SpaceX's Falcon 9 lifts off early carrying the Dragon CRS4 to the International Space Station (ISS) (AFP Photo/Bruce Weaver)

Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, Sept. 23, 2014. Russia's Soyuz-FG booster rocket with the space capsule Soyuz TMA-14M that will carry a new crew to the International Space Station (ISS) is transported from hangar to the launch pad. U.S. astronaut Barry Wilmore, and Russian cosmonauts Alexander Samokutyaev and Elena Serova are the next crew scheduled to travel to the International Space Station on September 26. (AP Photo/Pavel Golovkin)

Hearing about all the excitement in places like the Ukraine, Syria and Iraq, and then seeing things like this make me wonder what our fearless leaders are thinking. Then again, maybe I should be wondering just who is pulling the strings. Compared to world wide oil production, all the space programs in the world don't amount to a hill of beans. So I guess we should be glad we are still on speaking terms with Putin. We are, aren't we?

Tank Girl

Tajikistan, ca 2000, inside an armored personnel carrier.

I'm not sure what we've got here. She's wearing some sort of camouflage jacket, but she's also wearing earrings. I dunno, maybe all girls wear their earrings into battle. I was going to title this "Girls with Guns", but there is no gun in the picture, so I went with the pop culture reference.

Kazakhstan's Kashagan Oil Field

 

When I first saw this, I wasn't sure what I was looking at. It's in Kazakhstan, which is over there on the other side of world along with Afghanistan and Pakistan and all the other 'stans. I mean it kind of looks like a desert, which wouldn't be out of place in that neighborhood.

Then I saw this picture and I realized that what I thought was desert sand in the first picture is actually ice. The first picture was taken in the winter and this one was taken in the summer.

This is an artificial island constructed in the Caspian sea as part of a project to exploit the Kashagan oil field that lies there. Posthip Scott send me a link to a good, concise video (that is not embeddable) that gives an good overview of this project, along with a link to a well written story about this project. The Wall Street Journal also has a short video about the problems this project is having.

Seems a consortium of oil companies has sunk $50 Billion into this project over the last 20 years. It is a challenging project even by oil company standards. I mean they are regularly drilling for oil in water that is a mile deep. A comment in one of videos mentions that the $50 billion that has been spent would be more than enough to send a man to the moon. It's also about half what the USA spends every year on our "war" in Afghanistan.

The world runs on oil, so I can understand why these guys would be willing to sink that much money into this project. After all, this is the biggest find since Prudhoe Bay in Alaska was discovered 40 years ago. The part that gets me is that all the oil they expect to reclaim from this field will only satisfy our civilization's thirst for oil for one steenking year. Oh, it will take much longer than that is suck it dry, but if you add it all up, it is just a drop in the metaphorical bucket. We need a new oil field discovery comparable to this one every year. We don't get them, of course, so we have guys scouring the world for whatever they can find. Makes me wonder why everyone doesn't have a job prospecting for oil, but let's try and stay on topic, shall we?

One of the biggest problems with the Kasagan (cash again) oil field is the presence of hydrogen sulfide gas, and it's not here in just the trace quantities that are enough to produce that familiar "rotten eggs smell" that comes with many oil wells. Here it is a sizeable fraction of what comes out of the well, and it's under high pressure: 12,000 PSI (pounds per square inch). That's a bunch. There are plenty of everyday industrial techniques that deal with high pressures, like Natural Gas pipelines, Oxy-Aceteline gas welding tanks, and the hydraulic systems you find on everything from garbage trucks to the power steering on your car. But all those everyday systems only operate on two or three thousand PSI, not twelve freaking thousand. I am not sure anyone even makes any kind of hose that will handle that pressure, which means that all the plumbing has to be done with pipe, and not just ordinary, extra-strength, high pressure, steel pipe. Oh, no, that would be too easy. Seems hydrogen sulfide gas is not just poisonous, but it is also corrosive, and at high pressures it is extremely corrosive. So you need special non-corrosive lining in your high-strength, extra high pressure capacity pipe.
     So they have spent all this money, built all this drilling and processing equipment, hauled it to the far side of world through the Don-Volga Canal, drilled the wells and laid the pipelines. But now we have another problem. I expect this is just the zillionth one this project has run into, but it's something that even non-engineers can understand, so let's make the most of it.
    The pipeline started leaking. It's bad enough that it's full of oil and it runs through an environmentally sensitive area (has anyone ever run a pipeline through an area that isn't "environmentally sensitive"?), but it's also full of this deadly poisonous, nasty, corrosive hydrogen sulfide gas. Surprisingly, they shut it down. From the way the oil industry is portrayed in the press, I would have expected them to charge on full steam ahead until the piles of dead Kazakhstani's were visible on Google Earth. But they didn't.
    One guy mentions the pipes were fine when they were delivered, but then they sat out in the desert for several years, unprotected, before they were finally connected up into the pipeline. Hard to imagine that a little ordinary weather could affect an anti-corrosion coating that is supposed to resist the devil incarnate (hydrogen sulfide), but maybe it's a matter of chemistry.
   Anyway, I'm kind of wondering how they protected the joints between two sections of pipe. Pipelines are normally welded, and the heat from welding is going to destroy any kind of coating on the inside of the pipe, so how are you going to reapply the protection to the inside of the joint after you are done welding? I suppose you could use something like a paintbrush on a 40 foot pole, and a video camera to check your work, but boy, would that be tedious. I can see how somebody might slip up occasionally, and that's all it would take.
    It looks like it will probably be cheaper to build a new pipeline than to try and reclaim the old one. Whoops, there goes another billion dollars.

Russia Strong

Russian self-propelled artillery on parade in Red Square, Moscow.

Russia has two big military holidays every year. One in November to celebrate the 1917 Revolution and one on May 9th to celebrate their victory over Nazi Germany in WW2. When the Soviet Union was still in business, they used to celebrate these two holidays with massive parades of military armaments through Red Square in Moscow. I vaguely remember hearing about these when I was a kid and people making a fuss about some new missile being revealed for the first time, along with the usual endless speculation about "what it all meant".
   When the Soviet Union collapsed, the parades stopped. Russia has been recovering and in 2008 they were feeling flush enough to restart these parades.
   I have been looking through some photos of the Russian military from a few years ago and came across some from their violent disagreement with Georgia wherein I found this excerpt:

THE psychodrama playing out in the Caucasus is not the first act of World War III, as some hyperventilating politicians and commentators would like to portray it. Rather, it is the delayed final act of the cold war. And while the Soviet Union lost that epic conflict, Russia won this curtain call in a way that ensures Washington will have to take it far more seriously in the future. This is not just because, as some foreign-policy “realists” have argued, Moscow has enough troops and oil to force us to take into consideration its supposedly irrational fears. Rather, the conflict in Georgia showed how rational Russia’s concerns over American meddling in its traditional sphere of influence are, and that Washington had better start treating it like the great power it still is. - Ronald Steel in The New York Times, August 24, 2008.

I don't like the "news", mostly because everything is presented as equally important. It's not. 99.9% of it is drivel. There are some sources that give you a better concentration, but then they usually have an agenda as well. My random walk technique suits me well enough, though sometimes I am a few years late to the party.

Antonov in Iowa

 

The GP-4000 is driven into the Antonov cargo plane at the airport in Lincoln, Nebraska. July 2010.

In The Cobweb we have a giant Antonov cargo jet landing at a city airport in Iowa. The Antonov is a big plane. I'm wondering if there are really any airports in Iowa that can handle it, and I turn up this picture. OK, so it's not in Iowa, it's in Nebraska, but that's right next door (across the Missouri river) so that counts, right?. Nebraska used to be the home of SAC (the Strategic Air Command), so they would have big fat runways that could probably accommodate a whole fleet of Antonovs. Still, we're in the same neck of the woods and people are shipping big things by air.
    The machine in this picture is a "slip form paver" used for paving concrete roads. It is going to Georgia, the country in central Asia, formerly part of the Soviet Union, not the state of Georgia, currently part of the USA.
    The machine was going to Georgia to work on rebuilding the E60, which is the modern highway which basically follows the route of the old Silk Road, which leads from China to the rest of Asia and Europe.
    Silk Road was also the name of the clandestine website that the Feds busted last year.
    The Cobweb has Federal agents busting a clandestine operation in Iowa, which has hired the Antonov, or at least I think it's going to. I haven't finished the book yet, but that sort of looks like what is going to happen.
    Isn't it great the way all these things connect up?

Note: this plane is the Antonov-124, a large commercial jet air freighter. Several dozen were built and are still flying.. The largest jet aircraft is the Antonov-225, but there is only one of those. The 124 has four engines, the 225 has six.

Kyrgyzstan, Part 2

This showed up in my email this morning. I came across a smaller version of it yesterday and asked for a larger one, and voila! This statue is in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. The short version of the story is that the horse carried the man until he was too tired to go on, and then the man carried the horse. I imagine there is a longer version but I have been unable to find any trace of it. Bishkek is the same city where the Manas airport is, the one being used to supply our troops in Afghanistan.