If Serbia could have been used by them for their ends, they would have done so if the Serbs had been willing to go along with it, and Serbia would have been left to face disastrous consequences if the situation got bad enough and it was no longer in the U.S. rulers' interest to support Serbia. I expect the same will be true with Ethiopia.

It is an existential threat, but I don't believe our government is working to defeat it. Our government keeps allowing them to immigrate here despite Islam being the religion and motivation of the enemy.

If writers on Chronicles take a position against the secession of Kosovo from Serbia, partly on historical grounds, what of Ethiopia? (I'm not talking about military intervention, which is a different question--just sympathy).

The Bush White House has never said any such thing, just the opposite - 'religion of peace' et al. And this hardly explains US support for Islamic Kossovo. US policy is much more consistently anti-Slav or anti-Orthodox-Christian than anti-Islam.

In any case, over in the real world Islam has always been an existential threat to all of Christendom. It's more a question of capability than intent - currently Islam has no military capability to conquer Christendom, but it seems to be doing pretty well via other methods.

We keep confusing oil with the U.S. per se. The Japanese for example have proven a car can run on water and are set to market it here. An improvement (long overdue) on the old steam engine, and just as sexy in terms of pick-up, speed etc. as the internal combustion engine. And it is cheaper of course to operate.

But here is a tribute to Africa it is said the mother continent of us all:

"For as the sun is daily new and old,
So is my love, still telling what is told." -W.S.

Now that I don't read the torah or bible as much I tend to read shakespeare more... You can't beat him, except with a stick - & that's always been one of the imperfections of our world.

Of course even if Africa is our mother we're not at this point black per se...we're more like Steve Martin in the film "The Jerk" wherein he is the albino child of black parents. I saw that film once and if memory serves (which it usually doesn't) he became a child who has his own by inventing sunglasses with a rearview mirror so while walking he could see behind him?

Not to fear the Japanese invention of a high performance water driven automobile engine...we can just buy one, reverse engineer it and sell it here ourselves. Just as the Japanese have done with all of our original inventions, like the VCR etc. Are you old enough to remember the VCR?

Of course we probably already have a high-powered steam engine for automobiles of our own... but have been quashed from utilizing it... Ain't THAT America today - you know - land of the "free".

They used to call it the home of the brave... but now what-?-the knave. i.e. Amerika?!, sadly. That's why even in the 60's... we'd all gone to LOOK for America ...................
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Regarding the Caspian Sea oil fields, U.S. efforts at asserting petro-hegemony over that region seem to have been rebuffed, what with the formation of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization between Russia, China and the Central Asian states.

According to what I've read on the subject, what really keeps our foreign policy makers up at night is the prospect of major oil exporting countries taking their oil off the international market - which the U.S. largely controls - and opting instead to sell it through bilateral trade pacts. China has a bilateral trade deal with Iran, and Venezuela has threatened to do the same. Since controlling the international oil futures markets gives the U.S. considerable leverage over other countries, as well as giving us first dibs on the world's oil output, I would have to think that if much of the world's future oil output is locked up in bilateral trade deals, this would greatly undermine the United States.