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The demographics of Siberia are complex. Once the domain of nomadic tribes, gigantic Siberia came under Russian control in its march east at about the same time as the North American west became part of the British or US domain. Invading armies from France and Germany found out with horrible consequences that they couldn’t even conquer and occupy European Russia as far west as Moscow, never mind the overwhelming spaces of Asian Russia, where whole armies got swallowed up in the First World War. During the Stalinist period, Siberia became synonomous with the land of the Gulags, slave-worker camps whose domain actually extended far to the east of what the Russians call Siberia into the Russian Far East and maritime provinces. There the so-called (in English), 3-400 Siberian tigers (Amur tigers in Russian and German) make their last stand, and may actually prove to be the last great cats (and they are the largest anywhere) to survive in Asia. 10% of them still inhabit extreme northern China (with a few in North Korea), underlining the closeness of the two emerging (again) superpowers Russia and China.
If you are very lucky you may see tigers on either side of that border, but you will see very few Chinese in Russia and fewer Russians in China save along the border cities on the Amur river where the Russian markets are serviced by Chinese coming across for the day to sell Chinese goods or perhaps even to stay (in isolation) for some months or even years with no intention of remaining in Russia permanently. Meanwhile Siberia and the Russian Far East are losing population dramatically, as their Russian populations attempt to escape the poverty and unemployment that has overwhelmed the remote area since the fall of the Soviet Union, by moving to the big cities of the west. The paranoid Russian nightmare is that the Chinese will spill over into the emptiness of eastern Russia and attempt to recolonize areas of Russia that once in fact had Chinese populations.
In Siberia there are signs of this happening, but the Chinese are being preceded by a group whose presence noone could have predicted five years ago. 2.5 million so-called Russlanddeutsche (Russian-Germans), who had been living in European Russia for centuries before being expelled to Siberia and Kazakhstan during World War Two, took advantage of the strange German blood-based citizenship laws to return to Germany after 1990. Integration has been anything but easy for them as most had forgotten how to speak German and had become in many cultural ways competely Russified or Kazakhified. A few thousand have now returned to what has become booming Siberia, (or indeed decided never to leave for Germany despite valid papers) to take advantage of plentiful work opportunities in the oil and gas fields of Siberia without which western Europe would be in for very cold winters. The Russian government contributes 100000 Rubels (3000 Euros), travel costs and free luggage transport to lure them back to a place their former Russan neighbours have abandoned. The countryside north of Novosibirsk may not be the equal of Fort MacMurray, Alberta, where the largest oil fields outside of Saudi-Arabia are now coming into full swing and housing costs rival those of Manhattan, but housing developments are springing up in Siberia built by Germans for Germans. According to an article in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, the housing developer of one such settlement did not understand the question when asked whether the Russians resented the Germans, given the war and all that, and then pointed out that these Germans had Russian (and German) passports, spoke Russian and were appreciated in any case by the Russians for their hard work. Down the road were settlements for Chinese immigrants, he went on, who the Russians really don’t like, and whose spokesmen needed translators to deal with the Russian authorities. The future of Siberia could be interesting.

Today’s NY Times reports the Fed Reserve chairman warned Congress that projected growth in entitlements under Soc. Sec. and medicaid threaten the economy. This is not news, but never-mind. Anyway, what I want to rant about is contained in this paragraph on Congressional reaction to Bernanke :

“His comments also dovetailed with statements by the Treasury secretary, Henry M. Paulson Jr., favoring efforts to curb the cost of entitlements this year, despite skepticism among some lawmakers that painful steps to deal with the problem cannot be taken two years before a presidential election.”

According to that observation–which I think is as honest as it is damning– America is un-govrernable 50% of the time. (Maybe more, as opponents of any major controversial effort know they can defeat it merely by delaying initiative for the first half of a presidential term.) America isn’t unmanageable–it continues its headless running around without direction—but it isn’t governing itself.

That to me is the headline. “America Out of Control Half the Time” Or that would be the headline if it were news to anybody. That you can’t do anything—like, say, withdraw from Iraq—within 2 years of a presidential election is pretty much accepted as fact by press, public, and obviously politicians. So it isn’t a headline. It isn’t news. Just like it isn’t news that social security is broke. That is accepted reality right along with the accepted reality that half the time the country simply can’t make big decisions. We’re old and tired. And sick.

America has political sclerosis. The vessels feeding and healing it are all plugged up with the plaque of money, and celebrity and mass stupidity. Maybe we lost our will? What do you call it when there is wide recognition that something needs to be done–get out of Iraq or secure SS–coupled with wide acceptance that nothing will be done?

There has been virtually no winter in southern Germany this year – last year there was snow on the ground from late November to mid-March – but a hurricane thundered in yesterday across western Europe. As the wind blew everything unchained around the garden of the palace of the Bavarian kings, a Shakesperean drama played out its final act in the seat of government at the edge of the Hofgarten in the wings of the old War Museum. Bavarian Prime Minister Edmund Stoiber, 14 years in power, announced that he would resign all his posts as of Sept. 30, 2007.
For Stoiber, at 65, it was a tragic end to a life-long career that had brought him within a very few votes of becoming German Kanzler in 2002. The way it played out demonstrated the wide gulf that separates the Protestant north of Germany, with its power centre in bankrupt Berlin, and the Catholic south, with its baroque splendour in booming Munich. In 2005, Stoiber actually set up shop in the grand coalition government ruled by Angela Merkel, where he offered to play the role of a kind of super minister. When Merkel offered him quite a bit less than that, he fled back to Munich to resume his position as Bavarian premier, much to the despair of many of his party colleagues. When the Süddeutsche Zeitung speculated that the Bavarians would never forgive “einen feigen Hund” (a cowardly dog) for cohabiting with the despised Prussians before fleeing back to safe home territory without a fight, the storm flags were flying, and the prognosis was correct.
But Stoiber didn’t give up, and his (angry) potential successors all swore they were loyal and would not be candidates if he ran again in 2008, as he said he would. Behind the scenes, however, the knives were out, and the mortal blow came, appropriately enough, from an unknown female backbencher in his own party who accused him of sending spies on her trail.
Yesterday, in the midst of the hurricane, it was all too much, and Stoiber gave up. But in many ways he may have also won. The leftist Süddeutsche, a permanent thorn in the side of Stoiber’s conservative CSU party, concluded in its lead editorial this morning, that all in all Stoiber had been a good premier of Bavaria – somethung that had never crossed its mind previously – and that it was sort of sad that he had been brought down both by his own weakness in going, however briefly, to Berlin, and by his inablility to realize that the red-haired backbencher from Franconia, who “loves to hear her own voice and see her own photographs” had made a charge he had to take seriously. Small failures in a major political figure, one would think, but maybe that’s what Shakespeare is all about.

So it turns out that the Liberal party of Canada decided at the last minute that Michael Ignatieff had made a few too many strange remarks, had identified himself too closely with too many strange US policies and had ultimately not shown that he deserved to be catapulted over the line of long-serving candidates seeking the position of head of the Liberal Party and future Prime Minister of Canada. A quick survey by one of the Mackenzies shows that there is general satisfaction with the result across Canada, except among the separatistes in Quebec.
Nobody could be less in cahoots with the Bush regime than the winner, Stephan Dion. Here we have a highly intellectual and very French political professor with ten years of political service under his belt and an impeccable record as the minister of environment responsible for Canada’s signing of the Kyoto Accord, which the current conservative governement is attempting to weasel its way out of. Dion won’t win a seat in Alberta where all the oil is, but he’ll win some in British Columbia and the Maritimes. The big quesion is whether Ontario can warm up to someone so French and whether the separatistes in Quebec, who dislike Dion because of his commitment to Canada, can ruin his chances in Quebec. But the Mackenzie Brothers once spent a week with Dion in Iceland and are ready to predict that the man’s basic decency and
honest humility (certainly very unfrench qualities for a politician), combined with his eloquent French and heavily accented English will prove to be a tough challenge for the Alberta-dominated Conservatives when it comes to the vote in Quebec. Could be even a tougher challenge for the Bushmen if they have to sit down and deal with Dion as prime minister and Ignatieff as foreign minister.