Principia Discordia

This will be a sort of political science answer to Kai's excellent Weekly Science News thread, which Ithink is brilliant.  I was hesistant to do something like this before, but, well, with this forum now...

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/06/22/the_2009_failed_states_index - This year's Failed States Index.  Failed states are usually bad (see: Afghanistan, Somalia) for more, and have a nasty habit of causing problems for everyone, since they are too weak to stop dangerous transnational actors, like terrorists or organized criminal gangs, setting up in them.  With the economic crisis increasing political instability, expect their numbers to increase.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/06/22/think_again_asias_rise - As the title suggests, Asia's rise is further away than many would have you believe.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/8125041.stm - The Republic of Scotland?  Not likely, but still possible.

http://undispatch.com/node/8517  UN SG Ban-Ki Moon is a very popular man, make no mistake.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8126555.stm - China offers a loan to Zimbabwe

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/30/aaaargh-onomics/ - The economics of pirate activity

http://www.globaldashboard.org/2009/06/30/maoisms-big-future-in-the-21st-century/ - A good reminder to keep an eye on the Naxalite rebellion in India.  Friends of mine travelling there a few year ago said to me that the Maoists have their shit together, are very good at the PR side of things (policing communities, providing food and water etc) and have a solid base of support.  

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/29/us/politics/29climate.html?hp - Obama seems to be trying to create some sort of fledgling global regime structure for dealing with issues of global warming and alternative energy.

http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/world/Iraq39s-dirty-squad-faces-acid.5408351.jp - The new face of the war in Iraq: the executive's personal death squads

http://www.acus.org/new_atlanticist/why-nigeria-matters - Well, the sudden rise in the price of oil is probably a major reason why Nigeria matters...

http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/2009/06/finally_kurt_ca/ - Kurt Campbell is finally swown in to deal with Asia.  Also, someone needs to take Sam Brownback behind a shed and put a bullet in his head.  That is how you guys deal with threats to national security, right?

http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/blog/blog.aspx?id=4002 - Sarkozy is one of the few people who can actually get away with constructively criticizing Israel's actions and policies.  When his time as President is up, can someone give him special envoy status and bundle him off, preferably replacing Blair in the process?  PLEEEEEAAAAASE?

http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSN2649445  Just what Somalia needs: more guns.  No, you see, they....actually, snarky words fail me here.

Awesome, Cain! Lots and lots to chew through here and I look forward to more :mrgreen:

Woo.  I'll probably update it every few days, to let the links build up.

Cain, my husband relies on www.afghannews.net and http://www.aopnews.com/ for all things Middle East and Southeast Asian, fyi.  Not sure what you think about these.

You might wanna sticky this

Set topic sticky

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article6644817.ece - Iran's biggest group of clerics has declared President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's re-election to be illegitimate and condemned the subsequent crackdown.

http://www.wikileaks.org/wiki/US_Special_Forces_briefing_to_Congressman_Miller_exposes_involvement_in_19_Latin_American_countries_during_2009_including_Honduras%2C_17_May_2009 - Because it is always nice to know who is where

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jul/03/land-grabbing-food-environment - The acquisition of farmland from the world's poor by rich countries and international corporations is accelerating at an alarming rate, with an area half the size of Europe's farmland targeted in the last six months, reports from UN officials and agriculture experts say.

http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=latin_americas_legalization_push - Mexico is leading the way on drug law reforms

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article6638568.ece - "The enemy of my enemy" still has a place in IR, though note the poor sourcing of this story

http://anthonyclarkarend.com/internationallaw/biden-on-israels-sovereign-right-to-use-force/ - Joe Biden doesn't actually understand international law.  Its OK though - Rahm Emmanuel has made it clear he wont take any shit from Israel, just like pretty much everyone else in the goddamn world. And since its Rahm, people will go out of their way not to piss him off.  He's like Jack Bauer, only he really exists.

http://washingtonindependent.com/49478/help-the-iranian-people-by-killing-them The URL says it all.  John Bolton seems to believe bombing things is a cure for everything from the common cold up to actual death itself.

http://drezner.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/07/06/international_relations_101_on_iran_and_honduras - Drezner lays out a simple frameworkto examine why regional groups like the OAS may be able to exert pressure in certain coup d'etat situations, but not others.

http://www.jamestown.org/programs/edm/single/?tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=35216&cHash=6b29ef08f7 - Russia is having fun in the Great Game.  With Azerbaijani oil, this time.

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/07/03/world/AP-ML-Syria-US.html - Syria's major client state, Iran, is in turmoil.  That Assad is looking to Obama to soften the potential blow of losing Iran is not too surprising.

http://shadow.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/07/03/missing_the_freedom_agenda_on_the_fourth_or_july - is the USA missing a "freedom agenda"?

http://www.belgraviadispatch.com/2009/06/post_121.html - Not really related to anything in particular going on, but read it anyway.  Greg Djerejian is mostly good people.

http://uk.reuters.com/article/idUKTRE5641D720090705 - Woo, riots in Xinjiang, the mostly Muslim and Uighur populated region of China.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/KG04Ag01.html - Russia is probably offering to help in Afghanistan due to the heroin trade having a pretty bad effect on the country.

http://www.cnas.org/blogs/abumuqawama/2009/07/007-hes-not.html - Rolling a critical miss on BEING A GODDAMN SPYMASTER.

http://www.economist.com/world/asia/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13961669 - Interesting, when you consider the quakes helping define Japanese policy decisions through history.  Given climate change issues, this is something that really needs to be considered in more depth.

http://www.jihadica.com/obama-is-more-dangerous-than-bush/ -Surprise!  Popularity and non-polarising tactics work better than ham-fisted pig ignorance in fighting terrorism.  Who would've thought it?

http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2009/07/in-defense-of-neo-con-bashing.php - Matt Yglesias offers up a reason why "Neo-Con bashing" is still important, and its a good one.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article6644667.ece - Global recession set to get worse, Brown warns global leaders.

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/07/china-looks-to-undermine-us-power-with-assassins-mace/ - Looks like the Peoples Liberation Army has been paying close attention to the advice of Unrestricted Warfare.  Going head to head with the US is a recipe for disaster, better to neutralize its technological advantages

http://www.drewconway.com/zia/?p=1104 - Drew questions the methodology of the previously linked Failed States Index.


And, your bonus, comedy IR links for the day

1.  http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/3736806/he-doesnt-get-it.thtml - Israel is Czechoslovakia, Iran is Hitler's Germany and Obama is Chamberlain.  Hilarity in a single column, truly.

2.  http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/06/11/for_fathers_day_the_ir_guide_to_parenting - The IR guide to parenting.  Rule 1: pay attention to the balance of power.

3. http://ricks.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/07/02/auto_tune_leave_this_town - People don't realize that counterinsurgency can be punk as fuck.

Cain, I just Ctrl-C Ctrl-V for mine, so that makes yours by default fifty times better and more awesome still upon reading.

Its not that much work, really.  Many are in my RSS feed, so when I click on them the text appears anyway.  Except for those jerkasses who make sure their site only shows like, two lines of text so you have to go to the real thing.

Ah. I wish I could RSS feed mine. :(

Its pretty easy.  I could walk you through it, so long as you know of some sites where they frequently update with science news.

Quote from: Cain on July 08, 2009, 03:28:58 PM
Its pretty easy.  I could walk you through it, so long as you know of some sites where they frequently update with science news.

Well, where I get mine is from an email that my adviser sends out from the Sigma Xi, the society that puts out Scientific American (no wonder some of it is pretty sensational). He gets the email from them and sends it out to his graduate students.

BUT, I found out that theres a feed on the sigma xi website. So thanks for recommending that because I'll no longer depend on email for my science news updates. Should be more regular from now on.

I was going to update this last night, then my connection failed, and now I'm on the new computer, setting up RSS feeds.  Might take a few days longer than normal. 

Given that I'm still working through the first post I think I can wait.

http://www.cnas.org/blogs/abumuqawama/2009/07/limits-counterinsurgency-afghanistan.html  Like the title suggests, one of the blogospheric kings of the COINdinista, Abu Muqawama points out a corrupt Afghan government is as big a problem as the Taliban.

http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/2392/dprk-nuke-verification-will-require-drilling Was North Korea faking a nuclear test?

http://attackerman.firedoglake.com/2009/07/24/powerpoint-the-anti-social-being/ Guns don't kill people, but power point slides do.

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/07/russian-navy-declassifies-cold-war-close-encounters/ Close encounters of the Soviet kind.

http://drezner.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/07/23/a_tangible_measure_of_obamas_soft_power Soft power: Obama has it.

http://www.jamestown.org/programs/edm/single/?tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=35319&cHash=717367d3ea Gazprom has money problems

http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/07/27/is_it_so_bad_that_pyongyang_wants_bilateral_talks What a surprise!  North Korea acts in a provocative manner, then wants to resume talks!  Who could have forseen this?

http://www.globaldashboard.org/2009/07/27/the-monday-map/  Lots of people who still haven't caught onto the distribution angle of the drug trade fail to realize exactly how powerful the Carrillo Fuentes cartel actually is, because of the small amount of territory it controls.  Perhaps this map can make it clearer.

http://lynch.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/07/23/cracking_down_on_moderate_islamists Personal suspicion: knocking out the moderates discredits the MB overall, allows for the power brokers in the military to decide on the succession without democratic interference.

http://ricks.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/07/23/wanat_viii_an_army_report_finds_a_major_coin_failure Incredible military FAIL here

http://www.undispatch.com/node/8679 Blame China, and their authoritarian-enabling politicians.  Buying up autocrats around the world, with cushy loans.

Political science BUUUUUUUUUUUURRRRRNNNNN!

QuoteA former national security advisor once confided to me his frustration after reading Kenneth Waltz. Even granting Waltz's claims that bipolar systems were more stable, he observed, such a statement was probabilistic and said nothing about the likely outcome of the one bipolar conflict that interested him: the Cold War. Nor did it offer any policy guidance.

Not from a link, but a general quote I thought I should share.  Its from Richard Ned Lebow's The Tragic Vision of Politics, and it just made Neorealists (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neorealism_%28international_relations%29) everywhere cry.

The triumphant return of IR links!

http://www.cnas.org/blogs/abumuqawama/2009/08/maybe-bacevich-has-point-introducing-afghanistan-strategy-dialogue.html  Take part in the dialogue.  No, seriously, if you think you have a point to make, email him.  The CNAS are the new, hip think tank on the block, with plenty of pull in Washington.

http://www.afghanconflictmonitor.org/2009/08/uk-commons-report-on-afghanistan-and-pakistan.html This looks good, but just remember the volatile political situation in the UK currently (ie even Gordon Brown's mother hates him).

http://anthonyclarkarend.com/internationalorgs/us-pledges-to-pay-un-peacekeeping-arrears/ Personally, I think this money would be more useful if the UN had its own standing army, but even failing that, I'm sure it can do some good via UNICEF or something.

http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/2413/pcs-the-how-of-proliferation-part-2 Exactly what it says on the tin.  Uh, URL.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/KH07Ak03.html The Great Games previously poorest players are looking to make a move on Kirkuk.  Go on, I say, reach out and upset someone.

http://attackerman.firedoglake.com/2009/08/06/deliberately-forgetting-lessons-about-terror-networks-resilience/ Paging Foucault, we need a quote about cutting off the head of the King in political theory, stat.

http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/publication/19490/us_aid_to_pakistanus_taxpayers_have_funded_pakistani_corruption.html In other breaking news, water is wet.

http://www.jamestown.org/programs/chinabrief/single/?tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=35371&cHash=417bc9e68a The Great Game pauses for no man or nation-state.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article6736785.ece Ah, the ever trustworthy western Intelligence sources. Ahem.

http://cominganarchy.com/2009/08/05/kaplans-myopic-geographic-determinism/ Georgraphic determinism is stupid and Kaplan ought to know better.

http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2009/08/parliamentary_j_1.html  The UK does not engage in torture!  It just makes notes of other people torturing their suspects.  Perfectly harmless.

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/08/former-somaliland-resistance-fighter-arm-us-to-beat-islamists/  Also, Newcastle says it requires more coal.

http://drezner.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/08/05/quick_hits_on_the_clinton_field_trip_to_north_korea What do the North Koreans love?  Backchannels.  They love backchannels more than a fat kid loves cake.

http://rothkopf.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/08/04/obamas_six_month_foreign_policy_report_card_part_deux_the_policies Could do better, Obama.  You're totally flunking international political economy, too.

http://www.amconmag.com/larison/2009/08/05/the-hunt-for-russian-aggression/  Ah yes, those scary Russians.  No doubt we'll be terrified even as their subs start to leak, and sink to the bottom of the Atlantic.

http://www.jamestown.org/programs/edm/single/?tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=35388&cHash=de883f76ab Pay no attention to the man behind the oil pipeline. 

http://www.globaldashboard.org/2009/08/04/gddigest040809/ A mini-roundup of some good stuff

http://www.reuters.com/article/europeCrisis/idUSL6371915 The human cost of last years Georgia-Russia war

http://www.juancole.com/2009/08/iran-beware-neocons-bearing-boycotts.html We must bomb the Iranians, to save them from their tyrannical regime!

http://www.jihadica.com/al-maqdisis-online-library-of-translated-jihadi-material/ Just some light reading.  Oh, hang on, someone is knocking on my door, asking to speak with me...

http://lynch.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/07/27/what_chinas_new_arabic_tv_station_means I'm telling you, there is no Great Game, I don't know what you are talking about.

http://mountainrunner.us/2009/08/bbc_propaganda.html The Taliban have communication savvy

http://neteffect.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/08/06/is_twitter_less_resilient_than_we_think Cyberwarfare over censorship?  Sounds fun.  Where do I sign up?

http://shadow.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/07/31/the_7_countries_that_are_pissed_at_obama_economics_edition ARGH!  SO FUCKING PISSSED RIGHT NOW!

http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/08/01/john_boltons_unrealistic_realism Bolton is still an idiot

http://ricks.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/07/31/brookings_obama_is_the_new_reagan Who is IOZ is now laughing, endlessly, at having been proved right.

http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/08/07/confirmations The State Dept has been busy.

http://duckofminerva.blogspot.com/2009/07/desertification-between-rivers.html Because what Iraq really needs is more problems

http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/2009/08/time_to_focus_o/ I don't know what you mean.  Everything is perfectly fine, and hegemony is easily sustainable.  Just look at, um, Iraq.  And Afghanistan.  And Kosovo.  And Somalia.  And....

http://www.thenation.com/blogs/dreyfuss/458866/billion_dollar_mystery_in_iraq Lawyers Shiites, guns and money. My sort of political manouvering.

http://warisboring.com/?p=2449 Could the USAF actually now be a balanced force, attuned to the needs of the current security climate?

http://whirledview.typepad.com/whirledview/2009/07/a-tribute-to-corazon-aquino-the-philippines-most-unlikely-president.html Nuff said

http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/blog/blog.aspx?id=4177 Quite possibly

http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/zontv/2009/08/lou_dobbs_cnn_birthers_obama_m.html An article about CNN's journalistic integrity (don't laugh!) and Dobbs' "birther" support. The true gold is in the comments, though.

http://www.cnas.org/blogs/abumuqawama/2009/08/pakgov-admin-costs-consume-50-55-us-aid.html  - Its being spent on ho's, guns and drugs.  To be fair, the same could be said of any salary of the US official or agency you care to name, so...

http://www.afghanconflictmonitor.org/2009/08/august-tied-for-deadliest-month-in-afghanistan-for-us.html And the UK is doing terribly this month, too.

http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/2445/indias-h-bomb-revisited - This seems to happen quite often. 

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Japan/KH29Dh01.html - its ELECTION TIME in Japan.  And the ruling Liberal Party (ruling?  More like a one party dictatorship) looks like it might get thrown out on its ear, for the first time in...well, forever.  And the new guys seem pretty committed to "normalising" Japan, which is very poor code for "having an army, navy, airforce and the will to use it".

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/KH29Ak03.html - Invading Iraq = strategic genius....for the IRANIANS.  I swear, Dick Cheney is an Iranian sleeper agent.

http://atlantic-community.org/index/articles/view/Will_Germany_Remain_Part_of_the_West%3F - Shorter Alantic Community: does culture determine politics, or vice-versa?  Either way, the constructivist in me is fascinated to see the outcome.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/belfer/publications/~3/HjjqZvVmQa4/ingushetia.html - COUNTERTERRORISM FAIL.  In case you didn't know, bits of southern Russia are still getting blown up, on occasion.  Admittedly not Chechnya, as much as I'd like their idiotic Governor to bite the dust.

http://www.jamestown.org/programs/chinabrief/single/?tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=35434&cHash=d1d96f3f64 - China plays it smart and slow.  They're good at it, too.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/11/AR2009081103257.html?wprss=rss_religion&sid=ST2009081103484 - Sharia is the new Libertartianism is the new Communism.  "If only we tried harder, it would REALLY work!"

http://drezner.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/08/27/what_is_realism - Not bad, but as far as I can see, Drezner jumps from "realism" straight into Neorealism, without considering the halfway house of Classical Realism, which strikes a rather good balance between the two.

http://rothkopf.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/08/25/christian_brose_is_all_wee_weed_up - A defense of Obama's foreign policy as not being the same as Bush II's

http://www.realclearworld.com/articles/2009/08/26/obamas_foreign_policy_97099.html - Argh!  George Friedman is talking sense!  Must...not...laugh...in....surprise....

http://lefarkins.blogspot.com/2009/08/eastern-european-missile-defense-bases.html - I hope this is true.  I really hope this is the case. 

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jJRZCOxiCfe2dTwYB1l2FJQBMcnw - Hurrah for diplomacy, I guess?

http://www.globaldashboard.org/2009/08/26/scarcity-as-a-non-traditional-security-threat/ - Resource wars are always fun.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/the-americas/090818/panama-drugs-violence - Lets party like its 1989

http://english.farsnews.com/newstext.php?nn=8806050408 - Hmm, backing off from a chance to attack the west?  Maybe they really do want to talk....

http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/08/23/real_realism - Walt has a go at defining Realism

http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/08/27/clintons_undisclosed_location - Clinton is pulling a Cheney with her "undisclosed location".

http://duckofminerva.blogspot.com/2009/08/neda-effect-in-sri-lanka.html - Sri Lanka needs more attention paid to it.

http://warisboring.com/?p=2524 - Looks like the worst in Darfur may be over

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/08/25/doubting_afghanistan - Counter-intuitive arguments are always a good thing in my book.

I'm going to keep posting these, whether you comment or not:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/04/afghanistan-withdraw - Sunny Hundal makes a case for staying in Afghanistan (I've argued against this elsewhere, especially his comments on instability, but it is a fairly good article nonetheless).

http://whoisioz.blogspot.com/2009/09/nothing-is-fucked-here.html - IOZ gives the flipside to the argument above.  See, I am fair and balanced now, just like the American medias.

http://www.cnas.org/blogs/abumuqawama/2009/09/kunduz-what-it-means-nato.html - North Afghanistan might go to hell quiet soon.  Also, I like McChrystal, who seems to understand the difference between "legal" and "smart".

http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/2455/follow-the-power - Google Earth, North Korea and power lines.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/KI05Ak02.html - Ooops, looks like leftover US bombs, and not Iranian bombs, are killing US soldiers in Afghanistan

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/KI03Df01.html - Plan Colombia is counter-insurgency disguised as a war on drugs. Colombia is a mirror of Afghanistan - and vice-versa.

http://atlantic-community.org/index/articles/view/The_Golden_Age_of_Proliferation_is_Here_to_Stay - Proliferation now, and forever more!

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/revealed-blairs-role-in-megrahi-release-1782523.html - This is becoming more and more fun.  Hopefully we can stick Blair in a jail somewhere, perhaps with a Muslim prisoner cellmate.  That would be just.

http://www.newamerica.net/publications/articles/2009/meaningless_election_17281 - I doubt even Hamid Karzai's family would risk their necks to vote for Hamid Karzai.

http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2009/09/canadians-to-stage-fake-attack-in-washington.php - If it hasn't been noted before, CANADA IS AWESOME.  A fake Afghan battle in Washington DC?  Fuck yeah.

http://www.globaldashboard.org/2009/09/04/the-lisbon-treaty-why-the-irish-should-vote-yes/ - As the URL says.  The sooner the EU integrates, the better.  Corruption and mafia and bombs for all!

http://drezner.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/08/29/the_benefits_of_live_summitry - Alan Garcia BUUUUUURRRRRRNNNNN on Chavez

http://www.juancole.com/2009/09/eu-foreign-ministers-condemn-nato.html - Speaking of Europe, EU foreign ministers have slammed NATO for its recent careless attacks in Kunduz.

http://www.juliansanchez.com/2009/08/28/torture-and-the-postmodern-right/ - Yeah, well, torture is bad is just, like, your opinion, and stuff.

http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/09/04/netanyahu_throws_down_the_gauntlet - Israel basically thumbing its nose at Obama.

http://www.jamestown.org/programs/gta/single/?tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=35439&cHash=00b53908b9 - Information on General Rashid Dostum.  On the plus side, he's pretty progressive, for an Afghan warlord.  On the negative side, he has a tendency to butcher soldiers who surrender to him.

http://ricks.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/09/04/yet_another_reason_not_to_hire_criminals_as_security_contractors - Who could have forseen such an event happening?

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/08/30/world/main5275268.shtml?tag=breakingnews - the President of Colombia has swine flu.  Hilarity has no doubt already ensued in Venezuela. 

http://www.undispatch.com/node/8840 - Axis of Evil reunion tour!

http://ricks.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/09/02/the_10_most_common_strategic_blunders - Because its nice to know

http://whirledview.typepad.com/whirledview/2009/08/to-negotiate-or-not-to-negotiate-that-is-the-question.html - Negotiation is awesome.  Suckas better recognise.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/06/g20-financial-crisis-banking-bonuses The G20 has amazingly, decided to not punish bankers who pushed us to the edge of financial ruin.  Quel surprise!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cif-green/2009/sep/03/peak-oil-energy - Take notes of locations and names.  Not suggesting anything is definitely gonna happen, I'm just saying.  Also, brushing up on your Spanish wont hurt your employment prospects.  Especially when you consider the Pepe Escobar article above.

Holy shit, I never saw this before. Maybe cause I always "mark all as read" when I return from offlinedom.

Something to do when it's fucking dead on the weekends!

This is an amazing thread so far, Cain.  I especially liked the proliferation article.

Also,

Quote from: Cain on September 06, 2009, 03:48:57 PM

http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/2455/follow-the-power - Google Earth, North Korea and power lines.

is 404ing on me.  Google turned up the same 404.  :tinfoilhat:

How odd.  Here is the article in my RSS feed:

QuoteWith today's announcement by North Korea that it is in the "concluding stages" of developing a uranium enrichment capability , a wonk's fancy turns toward...Google Earth. Unfortunately, its going to be very difficult to find a covert DPRK enrichment facility simply by looking randomly on GoogleEarth even if it's above ground. You are going to need whatever help you can get. And one of those might be the power consumption, assuming North Korea doesn't bury the power lines for miles and miles before they reach the facility. (That, too, might be a signature but probably not one you can exploit in GoogleEarth.)

If you do decide to search for these facilities in Google Earth, here are a few numbers that might help. According to the really very helpful article by Alex Glaser in Science and Global Security "Characteristics of the Gas Centrifuge for Uranium Enrichment and Their Relevance for Nuclear Weapon Proliferation," you can take 5,832 P1 centrifuges (the kind A. Q. Khan sold around the world) and produce enough weapons grade uranium in one year for a bomb even starting from natural uranium. I estimate each such P1 centrifuge at Natanz takes a floor space of 1.2 square meters. That average includes all the supporting equipment such as autoclaves for feeding UF6 into the cascades, refrigerators for removing the product, and pumps for keeping the vacuum between the rotor and the outer casing. That means such as one-bomb-per-year facility would have a floor space of 7,000 square meters, or roughly 5 warehouses (each 70 meters by 20 meters). Assuming that is above ground, that is a fairly large complex.

Another important signature might be the power consumed. Here we are going off into uncharted territory, as far as I can tell. What follows are my guesses for how much electrical power the enrichment would consume. It seems that one of the most important power consumption factors is the energy needed to keep the centrifuges operating at about 100 degrees C. That is the point of the tubes spiraling around the centrifuge in the image to the left.

If we assume that the centrifuge is about 10 cm in diameter (that is the approximate rotor diameter Alex quotes), then in order for it to maintain a constant temperature, what it radiates must be supplied by the heating coil. The heat loss from each centrifuge would be 107 Watts, assuming that each centrifuge is surrounded by "room temperature" air. That is certainly the impression one gets from looking at images from the Natanz. But this heating bill could be dramatically reduced by letting the room temperature drift up to, say, 50 degrees. If that is allowed to happened, then the power consumption drops to 76 Watts per centrifuge. It might also reduce the air conditioning load to the point where we can ignore that. If both of those conditions are met, the plant's electrical consumption could be about 0.4 megawatts. (For comparison, the Natanz enrichment facility will need 4 megawatts with the same assumptions once it is brought to its envisioned 50,000 centrifuge level. Since Natanz can only support one or perhaps two Gigawatt nuclear power plants, this means a consumption of 0.2% to 0.4% of the output of such power plants simply to sustain them with fuel.)

Note that I have ignored the power needed to run the centrifuge motors. There would certainly be an initial load when the centrifuges are started up but once they are up and running, there is little power consumption (if the motors were ever turns off, they could actually give a lot of that initial energy back.) There is also a little amount of energy used during operation to spin up the feed UF6 to the 350 m/s that the rotors are spinning at. But I calculate that this is between 1 and 3 Watts per centrifuge, small enough to ignore when you consider all the other approximations I've thrown in.

What does this mean for searching for a covert North Korean enrichment facility? It appears that it will still need a rather obvious power line. Unfortunately, one of the hardest things to determine for this post was the relationship between transmission line type and power carried. But, it seems that the DPRK would have to utilize 230 kV transmission lines for long distance transmission (unless it is built near a power plant, such as a hydroelectric dam) and a significant substation to step down the voltage. Those power transmission lines are relatively easy to spot in the US since they are the ones that usually have two poles and a cross beam (it is the second from the left in the image below) and cast a rather distinct shadow, what you really see in GoogleEarth. So wonk-readers so inclined should look for five or so warehouses with a 230 kilovolt power line leading into it. Of course, it is likely to be several years before such a facility is constructed and even longer before North Korea masters the art of running 6,000 centrifuges.

One final thought, not that we can use it in GoogleEarth but it might be an important way for governments to look for these things. There is nearly half a megawatt in heat output from this facility: it has to be removed somehow and might be visible in the infrared either from the roof of the warehouse or from a heat exchanger either into the air or into a river.

http://www.stiftungleostrauss.com/bunker/?p=1983 - why the move away from the Eastern European Missile Shield program is a very good thing for all concerned, regardless of the poor reasoning and handling of it.

http://www.ted.com/speakers/misha_glenny.html - This is for the counterinsurgency crowd, Misha Glenny talking about the rise of organised crime in Eastern Europe

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09/16/socom_psyops_against_uk/ - The vassals are getting nervous, and so must be pacified via Psy-Ops.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/15/world/asia/15swat.html?_r=2 - it looks to me like the Pakistani Army is helping organise death squads in Swat.  And some of you guys thought the Pakistani Taliban were a major threat....didn't I tell you the Army would bury them, once they served their purpose?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/terrorism-in-the-uk/6173739/David-Miliband-MI6-investigated-for-torture.html - I remember top MI5 officials telling me to my face that the agency did not condone or rely upon torture to get evidence, a couple of years before anyone heard of Binyam Mohamed.  So consider MI6's protestations with that in mind.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8260820.stm - Like with the UK, a German withdrawal would be more politically difficult than militarily.  Most experts on the region consider the German presence there to be less than useless, due to the complete risk-aversion of the German military, who are seeking to avoid fatalities like the British are suffering in what is a highly unpopular war.

http://www.globaldashboard.org/2009/09/18/policing-the-interracial-divide/ - This is creepy.  And shows how decades of conflict can breed some real racial aminosity where little existed before.

http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/nizar_manek/impunity_gap - The UK loves war criminals.  Unless they committed a crime after 2001, in which case they are an evil fuck.  Since when did the law have to make sense?

http://www.cnas.org/blogs/abumuqawama/2009/09/when-taliban-reporting-goes-wrong.html - yet further proof that newspapers are becoming useless, as they mangle and occlude discourse, instead of bringing clarity and understanding. 

http://www.cnas.org/blogs/abumuqawama/2009/09/lebanese-bernie-madoff.html - Oops.  On one hand, suckering Hezbollah is cool, on the other, its not exactly something to brag about, if you don't want your head cut off and put between your ankles.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/KI19Ak01.html - This is a beautiful move.  Its an open secret that Obama was going to offer to scrap the missile plan to get Russia on side against Iran.  And now, the missile plan has been scrapped.  Is Russia playing a bluff on Obama?  Have they turned?  Did Obama promise something else?  No-one knows, and that is half the fun.

http://attackerman.firedoglake.com/2009/09/18/how-stupid-is-ralph-peters/ - Answer: Ralph Peters is pretty fucking stupid.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article6839220.ece - Say what you like about Petraeus, the man is smart and eloquent as hell.  Tough bastard, as well.  He's pretty much the perfect thinking soldier.

http://cominganarchy.com/2009/09/18/understanding-the-ugana-uprising/ - Curzon adds some much needed context to the events in Uganda.  I too was having some trouble following the story, so it was much appreciated.

http://drezner.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/09/17/i_fully_support_president_medvedevs_outreach_to_american_dissidents - The Russian President wants to help American dissidents fight the power.  Drezner gives suggestions as to who he can meet.

http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/article.aspx?id=4323 - ah, inter-terrorist rivalry.  My money's on Hezbollah, for what it's worth.

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3778884,00.html - Another country the IAEA will be powerless to stop.  Oh goody.

http://www.juancole.com/2009/09/ahmadinejad-spews-raving-lunatic-anti.html - the Iranian president is trolling, again.



And finally, the most awesome thing I have seen in the past week: Kazakh's rapping to Tupac's Changes.

http://www.registan.net/index.php/2009/09/16/tupac-in-kazakhstan/

That last one is just awesome.

In some ways, quite apt too.  Kazakhstan is a one party dictatorship, a Saudi Arabia in central Asia.  Opposition party leaders and journalists tend to end up dead, and most people live in abject poverty, while their leadership is simultaneously courted by Europe, America, Russia and China.  They're even about to made the Chair of the OSCE (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organization_for_Security_and_Co-operation_in_Europe).

Back again.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/8288181.stm  - Irish look to be voting yes on the Lisbon Treaty.  The anti-EU crowd in the UK are confused, because ratifying the treaty allows for countries to withdraw from the organisation, but it also makes the EU more cohesive.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/01/world/asia/01nations.html - Uncover electoral fraud, get sacked.  Karzai is going to be our own little Diem, a millstone around our necks that will sink any Afghan campaign. 

http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/germany/germanys-shift-to-the-right - Social democracy is dead because most of its adherents are New Labour style corporate suckups in a friendlier package.  In this, the SPD are no different.  Look at how Die Linke is gaining ground against them.  Also, Slavoj Zizek is proved right again (the real battle of the 21st century is liberal democracy vs far-right populism, with the left relegated to the sidelines or co-opted).

http://www.jamestown.org/programs/edm/single/?tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=35569&cHash=ca3d04001c - I suspect no tears will be shed the day an Ingueshtian/Chechen/Dagestani bullet finds Kadryov's head.  On the other hand, its not like the sepratists in these three areas are much better, or any smarter.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/01/world/americas/01honduras.html - Part of the American Honduras coup supporters, Senator Jim DeMint is heading south to offer support to a regime which is, as we speak, kicking the shit out of everyone who objects to a military junta running the country.  Its worth noting the State Dept is currently revoking visas of coup supporters, and Obama supports ousted President Zelaya, so DeMint is not only supporting a corrupt military dictatorship, he's going against official US foreign policy in doing so.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/216100 - a good article by Drezner about the rise of China and its political instability.  Interestingly, China seems to be following the US program to world hegemony very closely.  If a future great power war breaks out, expect China to sit by the sidelines until a winner becomes clear, or vital interests are threatened.  They want to allow other powers to exhaust themselves and make their rise to the top inevitable.

http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/10/01/the_eu_georgia_report_nobody_looks_good - Georgia still started the war with Russia.  Is anyone really surprised?  No, but lots of dishonest hacks look pretty stupid right now.

http://www.voanews.com/english/2009-10-02-voa18.cfm - Al-Shabab militants in Somalia have claimed control of the country's southern port town of Kismayo.  If they can hold it, expect piracy to increase around there over the summer.

http://mondediplo.com/2009/09/11latviapictures - Look at these pictures.  Beautiful, but proof that Latvia sucks.

http://afpak.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/10/02/daily_brief_pakistani_military_operation_against_taliban_stronghold_looms - Expect lots of dead bodies, shallow graves and burnt out houses in South Warizistan's near future.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/09/28/countries/index.html - Glenn wins at foreign policy punditry, for forever.

http://www.registan.net/index.php/2009/09/30/the-uk-facepalms/ - Breaking news: the RAF are morons.

just bumping in to say thanks for the continued supply of nifty reading material

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N14178346.htm - suck it up, brown people.  It only counts as torture when it is done to Americans (or some Europeans).

http://www.jamestown.org/programs/edm/single/?tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=35825&cHash=d277d95011 - North Caucasus militantism is on the rise again

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/10/world/africa/10congo.html?_r=1 - United Nations peacekeeping officials were explicitly warned months ago by their legal advisers not to participate in combat operations with the Congolese Army if there were a risk that Congolese soldiers might abuse human rights, internal documents show. But the mission went forward — and the abuses took place as feared.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/2009/dec/13/drug-money-banks-saved-un-cfief-claims - Drugs money worth billions of dollars kept the financial system afloat at the height of the global crisis, the United Nations' drugs and crime tsar has told the Observer.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/24/ripa_jfl/ - The first person jailed under draconian UK police powers that Ministers said were vital to battle terrorism and serious crime has been identified by The Register as a schizophrenic science hobbyist with no previous criminal record. His crime was a persistent refusal to give counter-terrorism police the keys to decrypt his computer files.  The 33-year-old man, originally from London, is currently held at a secure mental health unit after being sectioned while serving his sentence at Winchester Prison.

http://www.forbes.com/feeds/reuters/2009/11/24/2009-11-24T213120Z_01_N24501946_RTRIDST_0_SOVEREIGN-ISSUANCE-MOODYS.html - Global sovereign debt is expected to hit $49.5 trillion by year end, a 45 percent climb since 2007 as the credit crisis takes a toll, Moody's Investors Service said on Tuesday.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20091213/wl_mideast_afp/britainiraqpoliticsinquirymilitaryblair_20091213153346 - Tony Blair's admission that Britain would have backed the Iraq war even if he knew it did not have weapons of mass destruction sparked outrage Sunday and calls for his prosecution for war crimes.

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/12/12/813556/-BOMBSHELL:-Weapons-Inspector-who-Opposed-Iraq-Invasion-was-Murdered,-say-Six-Top-Doctors - Six doctors who believe government scientist David Kelly was murdered have launched a ground-breaking legal action to demand the inquest into his death is reopened. They are to publish a hard-hitting report which they claim proves the weapons expert did not commit suicide as the Hutton Report decided.

http://www.news.com.au/breaking-news/developing-nations-walk-out-of-climate-talks/story-e6frfku0-1225810384368 - THE Copenhagen climate summit is in chaos after poor countries walked out of negotiations en masse today.  The G77, a group which represents 130 developing countries, walked out because it is concerned the existing Kyoto protocol will be abandoned.

http://www.alertnet.org/db/an_art/57964/2009/11/9-181230-1.htm - By 2050, the number of people at risk of hunger because of climate change will be 10 to 20 per cent higher than it would have been without climate change.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-fg-us-pakistan14-2009dec14,0,3724162.story - The L.A. Times reports that U.S. officials are considering expanding drone attacks into Quetta, a major Pakistani city where senior Taliban leaders are thought to be based.

http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/library/news/india/2009/india-091213-voa01.htm - India says it has successfully test fired a short range, nuclear-capable missile.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/mcclatchy/20091213/wl_mcclatchy/3374340 - On a continent where fewer than one in five married women use modern contraception, an explosion of unplanned pregnancies is threatening to bury Adongo's family and a generation of Africans under a mountain of poverty. Promoting birth control in Africa faces a host of obstacles — patriarchal customs, religious taboos, ill-equipped public health systems — but experts also blame a powerful, more distant force: the U.S. government.

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/news/2009/12/mil-091213-rferl01.htm - Abkhazia's de facto president Sergei Bagapsh has won a second term as leader of the separatist territory in an election hailed by Russia, but considered illegitimate by most of the world.

Quote from: Cain on July 01, 2009, 08:20:06 AM
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/06/22/the_2009_failed_states_index - This year's Failed States Index.  Failed states are usually bad (see: Afghanistan, Somalia) for more, and have a nasty habit of causing problems for everyone, since they are too weak to stop dangerous transnational actors, like terrorists or organized criminal gangs, setting up in them.  With the economic crisis increasing political instability, expect their numbers to increase.

Somalia's failed state is actually good. for somalians.

Quote
Table 1. Key Development Indicators Before and After Statelessness
1985-1990a 2000-2005 Welfare Change
GDP (PPP constant $) 836b 600c,e ?
Life expectancy (years) 46.0b 48.47c,g Improved
One year olds fully immunized against measles (%) 30 40h Improved
One year olds fully immunized against TB (%) 31 50h Improved
Physicians (per 100,000) 3.4 4h Improved
Infants with low birth weight (%) 16 0.3l Improved
Infant mortality rate (per 1,000) 152 114.89c,g Improved
Maternal mortality rate per (100,000) 1,600 1,100i Improved
Pop. with access to water (%) 29 29h Same
Pop. with access to sanitation (%) 18 26h Improved
Pop.with access to at least one health facility (%) 28 54.8k Improved
Extreme poverty (% < $1 per day) 60 43.2k Improved
Radios (per 1,000) 4.0 98.5k Improved
Telephones (per 1,000) 1.92d 14.9k Improved
TVs (per 1,000) 1.2 3.7k Improved
Fatality due to measles 8,000 5,598j,m Improved
Adult literacy rate (%) 24b 19.2j Worse
Combinedn school enrollment (%) 12.9b 7.5a,f Worse

Notes: aUNDP (2001); b1989-1990; cCIA World Factbook (2006); d1987-1990, World Bank/UNDP (2003); e2005;
f2001; g2006; h2004, UNDP (2006); i2000, UNDP (2006) j2002, WHO (2004); k2002, World Bank/UNDP (2003);
l1999, UNDP (2001); m2003; nrefers to primary, secondary, and tertiary gross enrollment.

http://www.peterleeson.com/better_off_stateless.pdf

And how much of that is due to aid agency intervention?

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601102&sid=asYXmlwaWSfQ - what seems to be missing in all the reports about violence in Haiti is how the Haitian police are responsible for a lot of it.  Also, as an aside, keeping aid from people will probably, in the long run, make violence worse, since people who are starving will likely attack people who aren't giving them vital supplies (isn't reality so random like that).

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jan/21/i-fought-to-survive-guantanamo - Omar Deghayes, former Camp X-Ray detainee gets interviewed by the Guardian

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/2010/01/yemen_the_return_of_old_ghosts.html - Adam Curtis explains how the conflicts in Yemen today are the result of British policy 40 years ago, only the media are too vapid and historically unware to report this fact.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Southeast_Asia/LA23Ae01.html - Look out for political instability in Thailand

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122780633&ft=1&f=1010 - Biden is being sent in to smooth sectarian tensions before the Iraqi election?  Are they aware of this man's reputation?

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/21/world/asia/21taliban.html - the Taliban seem to be figuring out fighting a (more or less) clean war does has its advantages, though I will be surprised if this is anything more than propaganda to make up for the fact they caused more civilian deaths than NATO this year

http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/declassified/archive/2010/01/20/al-qaeda-wack-a-mole-he-s-dead-he-s-not-dead-he-s-captured-he-s-not.aspx - I think the URL says it all.  Al-Qaeda commanders have made more comebacks than, uh, something that comes back a lot

http://www.chinasmack.com/stories/shanghai-man-survives-suicide-jump-blowup-sex-doll/ - again, the URL explains this story quite well

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/21/education/21chinese.html?em - both the Chinese government and the people taking these courses are being relatively smart.  China has a lot of untapped, latent cultural potential which is mostly blocked by the language barrier.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/31820385/osamas_prodigal_son/ - an interview with Omar Bin Laden, the son of Osama Bin Laden

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/01/secstate-clinton-on-net-freedom-tear-down-this-virtual-wall/ - tear down this firewall, Mr Jintao!

http://www.neweurasia.net/politics-and-society/down-that-dark-way-the-future-of-human-rights-in-kazakhstan/ - worth a read, Kazakhstan is at the centre of the Central Asian Great Game, but gets barely any press coverage at all.

http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/01/19/joe_nye_was_right - Stephen Walt talks about the empirical evidence for "soft power".

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/22/wto-chief-us-china-trade_n_432620.html - Trade friction between China and the USA is rising

http://www.politico.com/blogs/laurarozen/0110/Man_charged_in_Arkansas_shooting_claims_Yemen_Al_Qaeda_ties.html - sounds dodgy to me, personally.

Quote from: Cain on January 11, 2010, 02:14:07 PM
And how much of that is due to aid agency intervention?

QuoteBy the mid-1980s foreign aid was 58 percent of Somali GNP (UNDP 1998: 57) compared to only nine percent today (UNDP 2001).

OK, but this still seems to be a case that basically Somalia's government was really, really, REALLY awful, and things got a little better when it died off.  By any objective standard, living in Somalia is still like being force-fed shit sandwiches.

Also it seems most of that aid was put by the government into procuring arms.  Direct spending by such agencies may be achieving more with less now due to the lack of interference on their spending.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/saudis-suffer-heavy-losses-in-yemens-other-war/article1442483/

Playing the Saudis for fun and profit.

QuoteIf [the Hashed are] given the mission of taking a particular mountain, for example, they'll call up the Huthi leaders and tell them: 'We're getting five million riyals to take the mountain. We'll split it with you if you withdraw tonight and let us take over'... After the tribesmen take charge, they hand it over to the Saudis... The next day, the Huthi return and defeat the Saudis and retake the mountain... It's been happening like this for weeks.

http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/02/13/several_years_ago_i_met/?ref=mp

I love shit like this.

QuoteThe author also sees what this writer has argued: that American obsession with Afghanistan and an ever-expanding quest to stamp out Islamic insurgencies will "further chip away at the United States' strength, aggravate its strategic adversity, and increasingly narrow the room for maneuvers on other issues."

Quote from: Cain on January 25, 2010, 11:18:33 AM
OK, but this still seems to be a case that basically Somalia's government was really, really, REALLY awful, and things got a little better when it died off.  By any objective standard, living in Somalia is still like being force-fed shit sandwiches.

Also it seems most of that aid was put by the government into procuring arms.  Direct spending by such agencies may be achieving more with less now due to the lack of interference on their spending.

Very true.
This only disproves the statement 'government is always better than anarchy'.
Somalia still is a very very very bad place to live.


Oh regarding somalia:
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/para/pirates.htm
One of the main pirate groups call themselves the The National Volunteer Coast Guard.

QuoteAttacks by pirates and privateers were a major problem in the Americas between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Privateers were licensed by a government to raid the ships of declared enemies and shared their gains with the licensor. Pirates were not loyal to any country and attacked indiscriminately for their own gain. Governments with American colonies attempted to suppress privateering and piracy.

Statist display of blindness to own inconsistencies.

QuoteIn international law piracy is a crime that can be committed only on or over international waters

Sounds like the somali pirates aren't pirates as long as they stay in somali waters.
Why is NATO (and a shit ton of others) interfering with somali internal affairs?
It's like they don't think they are bound by their own rules or something.

My view is that while living in a state is not necessarily better than living in anarchy, the opposite is also true.

Also, reading from the Asia Times http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/LB20Df01.html  This is a very good piece about the institutional fascination of the American military with German methods of waging war, despite their utter uselessness.  The German school of thought is ultimately codified Napoleon, whose own innate brilliance came from the fact he couldn't be entirely codified and was actually rather unpredictable on the battlefield.  Subsequent German military forces and current American forces are the modern day equivalent of the Prussian Army at the battle of Jena-Auerstedt - so caught up in their rational and codified military procedures they lose the very flexibility they think they possess, allowing them to be beaten by numerically and technologically "inferior" (for a given value of inferior) forces.

Why would you imitate people you beat twice  :?

The most hilarious part about that is in WWI and II most officer training courses in France, Germany, America and the UK used almost exactly the same methods anyway.  WWI was a slaughterhouse that was won through attrition and WWII was lost because, essentially, Hitler was insane.  There was no tactical or strategic genius on any side, it was either squandered or purposefully kept out of any theatre of war which might matter.  Sun Tzu is spinning in his fictional grave.

IIRC WWI ended specifically because Americans weren't using the same tactics.  Both sides would shell the enemy for a week or so before making a charge.  Which was useless, because it let the enemy know where to send reinforcements for the next attack.  The Americans decided to shell a completely different part of the trenches in order to draw troops away from the actual place they were attacking, which let them break through the German line.

I'm sure that played a role, but by the end of the war, people who'd been right all along about the uselessness of trench warfare were pretty much the only officers left standing, and so ideas like stormtroopers (Germany) and front-line penetration with tanks (the British) were being tried by both sides.  It was still mostly attrition either way - Germany gave up not because it was pushed into a position where it had to stop the war or be occupied, but because it was literally out of supplies.  German troops were still on French soil at the end of the war - that was one of the reasons for resentment after the war which fed into the Stab In the Back myth which fed antisemitism and Nazi conspiracy theories.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/09/iran-torture-trials-begin_n_492349.html?ref=email_share

LOL, Iran investigates deaths during torture, while the USA does not.

http://fistfulofeuros.net/afoe/economics-and-demography/german-exports-and-that-looming-double-dip/ - as the URL suggests, Germany could see a "double-dip" recession (rumours I've heard is the Germans are so hysterical about the Greek economy because they did very similar stuff).

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ArmchairGeneralist/~3/Cc4zLpdTBg4/educating-the-media-.html - Congress is actually debating Afghanistan!  Its cute, how they think it matters.

http://washingtonindependent.com/78975/jack-bauer-does-not-exist-people MI5's former head thinks the Bush administration was too influenced by "24", and may have a point.  However, people in glass houses, throwing stones etc

http://clsline.wordpress.com/2010/03/08/due-process-victim-or-savior-of-counter-terrorism/ - this is how the UK views counterterrorism now, but I think under the Tories, things will change...

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2010/04/david-cameron-201004?currentPage=1 - an OK profile of David Cameron.  It gets some things wrong, but its good if you know nothing about him

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/12/world/asia/12tibet.html?ref=global-home - crackdown in Tibet by Chinese security

http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/declassified/archive/2010/03/09/pennsylvania-jihadjane-indicted-in-bizarre-plot-with-links-to-ireland.aspx - the strange story of Jihad Jane (I believe Faust referred to this earlier in the week).

http://www.democracyarsenal.org/2010/03/where-have-all-the-strategic-thinkers-gone.html - I can answer this one: they've all been thrown out for being trouble makers, not "following protocol" or upsetting their technocratic bosses. 

http://intelligencenews.wordpress.com/2010/03/11/03-154/ MI5's released some files.

http://www.juancole.com/2010/03/mahmoud-and-robert-show-comes-to.html - Gates and Ahmadinejad's argument: full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

http://www.politico.com/blogs/laurarozen/0310/What_Biden_told_Netanyahu_behind_closed_doors_This_is_starting_to_get_dangerous_for_us.html - Biden is finally starting to get through to the Israelis that they should stop being stupid pricks

http://offshorebalancer.wordpress.com/2010/03/10/no-clout-for-blood/ - couldn't agree with this more.  Britain does not get enough clout on Capitol Hill for the sacrifices it makes on America's behalf.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-j-martin/chinese-media-warns-of-mo_b_495458.html - China is cracking down in Xinjiang as well.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5g8xENaRiR-6dXpvFkGeL4tv5znBQD9I3M23G1

QuoteChinese steel mills and mobile phone factories are being idled and thousands of homes in one area are doing without electricity as local governments order power cuts to meet energy-saving targets set by Beijing.

Rolling blackouts and enforced power cuts are affecting key industrial areas. The prosperous eastern city of Taizhou turned off street lights and ordered hotels and shopping malls to cut power use. In Anping County southwest of Beijing, an area known as China's wire-manufacturing capital, thousands of factories and homes have endured daylong blackouts over the past two weeks.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/sep/08/security-forces-kabul-bank-run

QuoteAfghan security forces used batons on unruly customers scrambling to withdraw their savings today from the country's biggest bank, which is mired in a scandal of corruption and mismanagement.

Kabul Bank's troubles have threatened to add a financial crisis to Afghanistan's other woes, with military and civilian casualties at record levels as a Taliban-led insurgency grows ahead of parliamentary elections on 18 September.

Officers from the National Security Directorate struggled to maintain control of up to 200 people outside one branch in the capital as desperate customers tried to take out money ahead of a three-day Muslim holiday.

The crisis developed after the company's top two directors resigned amid allegations of corruption.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_8977000/8977025.stm

Quote"Huge quantities of black money, Russian money, have been kicking around in London for a long time," he asserts. "We chose to ignore it because Russia is, in many ways, a totally criminalized state. We have to bear that in mind. And it is a rich one."

This cash, he believes, helped bolster the UK's banking system during the recent financial meltdown – an intervention happily ignored by those in the know.

"The whole nature of big banking is about looking away," he says.

...

"The whole anti-terror threat has been terribly useful to politicians," he says. "It has been a way of manipulating us, it has been a way of giving police excessive powers, which they then misuse, I think we've got to draw back from that."

Arguing for a restoration of civil liberties, le Carre warns against the insidious power of what some in the United States term the "deep state".

"We have so many people who are indoctrinated, who are admitted to the secrets of state, and we have the people outside the circle.

"We have a situation where it is possible to go up to MPs as a whip in the House of Commons, as happened I think before the outbreak of the Iraq war, and say: 'If you have seen the papers I have seen, I know how you will vote.'

http://www.vanityfair.com/business/features/2010/10/greeks-bearing-bonds-201010?currentPage=all

QuoteIn addition to its roughly $400 billion (and growing) of outstanding government debt, the Greek number crunchers had just figured out that their government owed another $800 billion or more in pensions. Add it all up and you got about $1.2 trillion, or more than a quarter-million dollars for every working Greek. Against $1.2 trillion in debts, a $145 billion bailout was clearly more of a gesture than a solution. And those were just the official numbers; the truth is surely worse. "Our people went in and couldn't believe what they found," a senior I.M.F. official told me, not long after he'd returned from the I.M.F.'s first Greek mission. "The way they were keeping track of their finances—they knew how much they had agreed to spend, but no one was keeping track of what he had actually spent. It wasn't even what you would call an emerging economy. It was a Third World country."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-11189609

QuoteOfficials in Belarus say a prominent opposition figure found hanged at his weekend home outside the capital, Minsk, on Friday committed suicide.

Forensic examiners established that, apart from the noose mark on Oleg Bebenin's neck, there were no other injuries, a local prosecutor said.

Mr Bebenin, 36, founded Charter 97, a leading opposition website critical of President Alexander Lukashenko.

Colleagues said they could not believe the father-of-two had killed himself.

They pointed out that he had left no note and Charter 97′s editor, Natalia Radina, said he had not been having any family or health problems.

He had, she told independent Moscow radio station Ekho Moskvy, been absorbed in his work and campaigning for opposition presidential hopeful Andrei Sannikov.

Most independent media in Belarus have closed down and the authorities barely tolerate political dissent, correspondents say.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704621204575488361149625050.html?mod=WSJ_hps_MIDDLETopStories

QuoteThe Obama administration is set to notify Congress of plans to offer advanced aircraft to Saudi Arabia worth up to $60 billion, the largest U.S. arms deal ever, and is in talks with the kingdom about potential naval and missile-defense upgrades that could be worth tens of billions of dollars more.

The administration plans to tout the $60 billion package as a major job creator—supporting at least 75,000 jobs, according to company estimates—and sees the sale of advanced fighter jets and military helicopters to key Middle Eastern ally Riyadh as part of a broader policy aimed at shoring up Arab allies against Iran.

The moment the Saudi forces met anything near the determination of an enemy like the Iranians, they'd break and run all the way to the Yemeni border.  "Low morale and training" doesn't even begin to cover it.  Meanwhile, in living memory the Iranians were using mass charge tactics through minefields and having mustard gas lobbed at them day and night.  I suppose it makes the House of Saud feel safe, but they're more worried about internal subversion than the Iranians anyway, at least on a "imminent cause of death" level, not so much on the geopolitical one.  Also, I wonder exactly how much the bribes for these contracts added up to?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11277466

QuoteMilitary police are investigating claims that British soldiers may have trafficked heroin from Afghanistan.

The Ministry of Defence said they were aware of "unsubstantiated" claims that troops were using military aircraft to ship the drug out of the country.

Gosh, who could've forseen leaving troops (who just recieved a pay freeze) in a hell-hole which just happens to be the supplier for 90% of the world's heroin could have unfortunate consequences of this kind?  At least stuff like this didn't happen in the Vietnam War, or back in the Empire's heyday (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Opium_War).  Meanwhile, Canada is refusing to even investigate (http://www.cbc.ca/politics/story/2010/09/13/afghanistan-heroin-smuggling-canadian-britain-soldiers.html) similar allegations against their own troops.

http://www2.macleans.ca/2010/09/11/should-the-pope-face-charges/

QuoteGod in the Dock, meaning God on trial, is a familiar concept in Britain, both from the title of a famous collection of essays by C.S. Lewis and as a general term for skepticism about religious belief and doctrine. But Pope in the Dock? Literally? Perhaps not in our lifetimes, as British lawyer Geoffrey Robertson concedes in The Case of the Pope: Vatican Accountability for Human Rights Abuse, a book set to appear just one week before Benedict XVI makes the first-ever papal state visit to Britain. But, Robertson argues, the once unthinkable idea that Benedict or a successor could be charged with obstructing justice or for "harbouring pedophile priests" is now very thinkable, and—given evolving trends in international human rights law—may soon be practical.

The plain facts of the case to be answered are horrific and undeniable. Since the dam crumbled around the turn of the decade, a cascade of child sexual abuse by Roman Catholic clergy has come tumbling into the open. So many cases emerged that the U.S. Catholic Bishops Conference commissioned an expert study, which concluded in 2004 that, since 1950, 10,667 individuals had made plausible allegations against 4,392 priests, 4.3 per cent of the entire body of clergy in that period. The total bill in settlements with victims is spiralling toward $2 billion and won't stop, Forbes predicts, this side of $5 billion. Depressingly similar stories from other First World countries, including Canada, soon emerged; the situation in Latin America and Africa, where no investigations have ever been made, can only be imagined.

All that is but half of Robertson's case. And for the former president of the UN War Crimes Court in Sierra Leone and author of a landmark judgment on the illegality of recruiting child soldiers, it's actually the lesser half. Any institution can have criminal employees; what matters is its awareness of and response to their illicit acts. Church legislation against clerical sexual abuse dates back to the fourth century, and in 1952 Gerald Fitzgerald, the American founder of the Paraclete order, which treats erring priests of all sorts, brought a specific warning to Rome. "Leaving pedophile priests on duty or wandering from diocese to diocese," he said, was a moral evil and a scandal waiting to break.

See, sometimes international law can be useful.  Usually this is only by accident, though.

http://blogs.forbes.com/jeremybogaisky/2010/09/09/eroding-chinas-grip-on-rare-earth-metals/?boxes=financechannelforbes

QuoteIf China is trying to give its manufacturers a leg up by restricting exports of rare earth metals, it may find the advantage temporary.

With prices spiking following the latest in a series of annual export quota reductions by Beijing earlier this summer, miners have been scrambling to develop deposits of the essential industrial minerals worldwide. Now Japan's Nikkei business daily reports that Japanese manufacturers have developed technologies to make automotive and home appliance motors without rare earth metals. Hitachi has come up with a motor that uses a ferrite magnet made of the cheaper and more common ferric oxide. Meanwhile the chemicals conglomerate Teijin and Tohoku University have co-developed technology to make a powerful magnet using a new composite made of iron and nitrogen.

It's nice to read some good news for once.  I wonder how quickly the weapons applications of these new technologies will be exploited?

http://fistfulofeuros.net/afoe/spains-economy-re-enters-contraction-mode-in-the-third-quarter/

QuoteWell, that didn't last long, now did it. Two consecutive quarters of minimal GDP growth seem to have exhausted the forces of a more than fragile Spanish economy. All the post-June data we are seeing suggests the economy has now turned the corner (in the bad sense), and we should expect a negative quarterly GDP reading in the July to September period.

Perhaps the clearest indicator we have so far of the shape of things to come is offered by the August services PMI reading, which shows the sector went back into contraction in August, a performance that for a country which depends to some significant extent on tourism is really pretty striking.

More at the link.  Not good, as Spain is supposedly the domino which can collapse western Europe's economies.

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/09/israel-russia-in-drone-deal-laser-tech-next/

QuoteFirst, Israel will beef up Russia's robotic air force. Down the road, perhaps, Vladimir Putin may return the favor, by equipping Israeli drones with Russian laser tech.

On Monday, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak and his Russian counterpart, Anatoly Serdyukov, signed a first-of-its kind military agreement between the two countries. It's the latest step towards cooperation for two countries that have traditionally been at each other's throats.

In 2009, Moscow bought a dozen Israeli unmanned aerial vehicles — two Bird Eye 400 systems, eight I-View MK150 tactical UAVs and two Searcher Mk II tactical short range UAVs, according to the well-connected Defense Update. That was after Georgia relied on Israeli spy drones during the South Ossetia War.

Now, Russian officials say, Jerusalem and Moscow have agreed to a second, $100 million deal for another 36 drones. Delivery is slated for later in the year. A joint venture to cooperate on UAV production, worth an estimated $300 million, hasn't been hammered out, yet. But both sides seem eager. Russian boss-for-life Vlad Putin says Russia is even "considering the possibility of equipping Israeli aircraft with our devices – space technology and laser technology," the premier said.

I'm pretty sure Pooty-poo means laser range finders, not blasters. But it is worth noting that the Russian military seems to be showing interest in rekindling its long-dormant energy weapons program. Reports out of Moscow "suggest that Russia has re-started work on a Cold War project intended to produce a laser cannon mounted on an enormous military transport aircraft," The Register's Lew Page notes. The most likely application for the ray gun: blinding enemy satellites.

Tensions between Israel and Russia haven't been blasted away, yet. As Defense Update observes, Russia is still working on plans to sell arms to Syria, including Yakhont P-800 supersonic anti-ship missiles which could keep Israeli naval vessels at risk throughout the eastern Mediterranean. Then there's Moscow's contract with Iran for advanced S-300 surface-to-air missiles. Tehran could make any strike on its nuclear facilities much more complicated with such an air defense system. So if that deal goes through, all the new good feelings between Russia and Israel could crash like a malfunctioning drone.

On the other hand, lots of rich ex-Russians who either have or "bought" proof of Jewish backgrounds now live in Israel, and are powerful in conservative politics there.  I wouldn't expect a huge rift between the two to occur anytime soon.

http://www.jamestown.org/programs/edm/single/?tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=36807&cHash=dbe9c87c9e

QuoteAugust 2010 saw violent incidents all across Russia's North Caucasus region, above all in Dagestan, where rebels and Russian police dealt heavy blows to each other. On August 21, forces from Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) and local police supported by army units conducted a joint special operation and killed the leader of Dagestan's Sharia Jamaat, Emir Seyfullah (aka Magomedali Vagapov), who was hiding in a private house in Dagestan's mountainous village of Gunib (www.rosbalt.ru, August 21). Apart from being the military commander of his own Sharia Jamaat, Emir Seyfullah also was the chief qadi (supreme judge of the Sharia court) of the entire Caucasus Emirate. That means that he in fact was one of the top leaders in the North Caucasus resistance movement. A highly educated man who held two degrees in Islamic theology from Islamic schools and proficient in several languages, Emir Seyfullah was held in high esteem by his comrades-in-arms and was steadily advancing toward assuming the post of Emir of Dagestan. Doku Umarov, Emir of the Caucasus Emirate, himself attached high hopes to the late Emir Seyfullah. Although killing Emir Seyfullah was no doubt a big success for Russian law enforcement, the painful blow nonetheless had little, if any, impact on the jamaat itself. Almost everywhere across Dagestan, armed jamaat members have been striking Russian interests, inflicting dozens of casualties on Russian law enforcement personnel (www.kavkaz.tv, September 2).

Also known as "just another day in the Russian Caucasus."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/12/AR2010091200948_pf.html

QuoteISTANBUL -- Turks approved sweeping changes to their military-era constitution Sunday - a referendum hailed by the government as a leap toward full democracy in line with its troubled bid to join the European Union.

With 99 percent of the vote counted, 58 percent had cast ballots in favor of the constitutional amendments, state-run TRT television said. About 42 percent voted "no," heeding opposition claims that the reforms would shackle the independence of the courts.

The referendum on 26 amendments to a constitution crafted after a 1980 military coup had become a battleground between the Islamic-oriented government and traditional power elites - including many in the armed forces - who fear Turkey's secular principles are under threat.

Voter turnout was 78 percent, and the result amounted to a vote of confidence in the ruling Justice and Development Party ahead of elections next year.

"We have crossed a historic threshold toward advanced democracy and the supremacy of law," Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said at his party headquarters in Istanbul.

"The regime of tutelage in Turkey will now come to an end," he said. "The mentality will be so that those enthusiastic for military coups will see their enthusiasms stuck inside them."

The amendments make the military more accountable to civilian courts and allow civil servants to go on strike. The opposition, however, believes a provision that would give parliament more say in appointing judges masks an attempt to control the courts, which have sparred with Erdogan's camp.

Given how the courts were for a long time puppets of the military, and the previous constitution was drawn up by the military junta who took charge in 1980, I believe the correct way to describe the military's reaction would be "sour grapes".

And finally, proving once again (http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/02/13/ir_theory_for_lovers_a_valentines_guide) that studying IR can improve your love life, we have dating advice from Berlusconi:

http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/09/13/dating_advice_from_berlusconi

QuoteNo surprise that Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusoni and Libyan leader Col. Muammar Qaddafi seem to be extremely fond of each other: they're both prone to making extremely... questionable... comments. Berlusconi put on his old sage hat Sunday and offered this relationship advice:

QuoteI said to a girl to look for a wealthy boyfriend. This suggestion is not unrealistic.

Berlusconi, being famously wealthy himself, noted that women are drawn to him because he's a "nice guy" -- and oh yeah, that "I'm loaded." He went on to say women like older men because they think, "'he's old. He dies and I inherit.'" Classy.

Of course Berlusconi's trysts are well known. He's been accused by his wife of putting attractive young women on his party lists in European elections, and last year he was embroiled in a scandal over his 'companionships' with a slew of women. His wife is seeking a divorce.

As if his comments on women weren't bad enough, he went ahead and made a Hitler joke -- based on the premise of Hitler's followers urging him to return to power. Berlusconi preemptively acknowledged his crassness, saying "I already know I am going to be criticized."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/13/AR2010091305920.html

QuoteIN MOGADISHU, SOMALIA During the day, Mohamed Mahmoud counts the African Union peacekeepers in his neighborhood and notes their locations. At night, he gives the information to his handlers in the radical al-Shabab militia, undermining the U.S.-backed government that the peacekeepers support.

"We are everywhere," he said.

In the deadly contest for the capital, spies like Mahmoud work in the shadows of this failed state's civil war. The militants they assist have weakened the government and limited its ability to protect the population, tactics used by insurgents in Baghdad, Karachi and Kabul.

"We're fighting one war in the open, and another war below the surface," said Abdiraheem Addo, a military commander and close associate of Somalia's President Sheikh Sharif Ahmed.

Conversations with spies and former spies in Mogadishu provide a rare look into how al-Shabab, designated a terrorist organization by the United States, operates in government-controlled areas. Its increasing role here helps explain how the government and 6,000 peacekeepers, supported by hundreds of millions of dollars from Washington and its allies, have been unable to quell a ragtag guerrilla force with little public support.

Quite interesting, actually.  They're moving very much to the "targeted assassination" end of things, rather than the indiscriminate bombings etc you'd expect from a group that has members coming in from Afghanistan and Pakistan.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/sep/29/roma-france

QuoteThe European Union has decided to launch legal action against France over its expulsions of Roma to poorer EU nations.

A European commission spokeswoman, Pia Ahrenkilde, said the commission believed France had not applied EU rules allowing free movement of EU citizens. She said the commission decided today to send an official notification letter to France asking it to apply the EU rules. The commission is also asking France for more details about the expulsions of hundreds of Roma.

These steps could eventually lead to a court case against France.

The commission stopped short of saying that France was discriminating against a specific ethnic group. France has come under wide criticism for the expulsions, from the EU as well as the United Nations and the Vatican.

About time.  I must say though, if this leads to a European Civil War, I want dibs on invading Bordeaux, there's some mighty fine looting there....

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/sep/29/terror-attack-plot-europe-foiled

QuoteA plot to launch "commando-style" attacks on Britain, France, and Germany has been intercepted and foiled by drone attacks on militants based in Pakistan, security and intelligence sources said last night.

The plan for suicidal onslaughts similar to the 2008 atrocity in Mumbai – where 166 people were killed in a series of gun and grenade assaults – was disrupted after a combined operation involving US, UK, French and German intelligence agencies, officials said.

British security and intelligence sources, who have been concerned for some time about the possibility of a Mumbai-style attack in Europe, confirmed that they believed a plot was being hatched from Pakistan.

The increased rate of coordinated US drone raids along the border with Afghanistan is believed to be a response to intelligence gathered about the plot. Security sources insisted that attacks in Europe were not imminent.

Poor, poor Al-Qaeda.  They're never going to top 9/11 unless they get a dirty bomb and explode it in a city the American President is visiting.  Yes, OK, this would've been bigger than Mumbai, but it still basically amounts to cribbing ideas from Lashkar-e-Taiba.  And that's just sad.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/sep/29/silvio-berlusconi-mps-confidence-vote

QuoteSilvio Berlusconi appears certain to survive a confidence vote in parliament tonight after rebel MPs loyal to his former lieutenant, Gianfranco Fini, opted grudgingly to keep alive Italy's right-wing government.

After hearing the prime minister appeal for unity in a speech to the lower house, their spokesman, Italo Bocchino, said: "We shall give a confidence vote to the government because today's address to the chamber [of deputies] follows closely the programme on the basis of which the governing majority was elected."

Their climbdown handed a victory to Berlusconi that should ensure his government survives into next year. But the split on the Italian right has poisoned the atmosphere surrounding his administration.

The rebels pointedly omitted to applaud the prime minister's speech. And Fini reportedly called a meeting next week to discuss a new party, separate from Berlusconi's Freedom People movement.

Speaking of sad, my hopes that Berlusconi would be forced from power have been dashed again.  But this looks a more serious threat than previous ones, even with the climbdown, and may be the future foundation of further challenges to his leadership.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/northkorea/8031761/North-and-South-Korea-to-hold-first-military-talks-for-two-years.html

QuoteA meeting involving three officers from each side will take place at the border village of Panmunjom, which lies on the northern side of the demarcation line that splits the two countries.

The meeting comes as Kim Jong-un, the 28-year-old third son of Kim Jong-il, was promoted to be a four-star general and also to be one of the two vice-chairmen of North Korea's Central Military Commission, a key role that places him squarely in line to succeed his father.

And if you don't believe those two facts are connected, I have a bridge for sale that may interest you...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/southamerica/brazil/8031623/Clown-close-to-winning-a-seat-in-Brazil-parliament.html

QuoteA humorist known for dressing as a clown and poking fun at politics is running as a candidate in the Brazilian election, and has a good chance of being successful.

Detractors have filed a dozen lawsuits against Tiririca - whose real name is Francisco Everardo Oliveira.

While most attack him for ridiculing Brazil's legislative institutions, the most serious suit seeks to invalidate his bid for a federal seat by claiming that he is, like 20 per cent of the population, illiterate.

The commotion around Tiririca would be minor in other circumstances. But it has taken on bigger proportions because, according to polls, the comic is within reach of actually winning his seat to represent Sao Paulo state.

He has gained popularity with his advertisements, which contrast with the run-of-the-mill "vote-for-me" pleas seen on television.

While most candidates smile determinedly at the camera and pledge standard vows to cut corruption or improve health services, Tiririca - who graduated from being a circus performer to a television personality - serves as comic relief.

"It can't get any worse if you vote for me," is another of his slogans, delivered with a wide smile and both hands held up in a V-for-victory sign.

While many of Brazil's 135 million voters now easily recognise him, and say they will vote for him either because they are amused or because they are tired of the usual politicians, some cast down their heads at Tiririca actually becoming elected.

"I feel ashamed to be Brazilian... This is getting out of hand," said one voter on a Brazilian news website.

Well at least your politicians aren't as embarrassing as American, Israeli, Italian or Iranian politicians...yet.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/sep/29/wind-fossil-fuel-denmark-2050

QuoteThe falling cost of renewable energy and rising cost of oil and gas will allow Denmark to develop an energy network entirely free of fossil fuels by 2050, according to a report published by the government's climate commission.

The committee predicted that wind and biomass energy could meet the bulk of the country's energy requirements.

It also argued that switching to renewables would be cheaper than continuing to use fossil fuels, particularly if predictions of soaring oil and gas prices are borne out.

Good news...for those who will live to see 2050.  I intend to die in the clone wars before that.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/sep/27/new-zealand-foreign-farmland-purchases

QuoteNew Zealand plans to tighten controls on foreign land purchases amid fears that the Chinese acquisition of local farms may not be in the country's strategic interests.

The new rules were announced today after a fierce public backlash against a Hong Kong-listed firm that attempted to buy New Zealand's biggest private dairy farm.

Natural Dairy – previously known as the China Jin Hui Mining Corporation – offered to pay NZ$1.5bn for farmland, cattle and milk powder production plants, according to the domestic media.

This bid for the Crafer family's farms – now under review – has stirred up considerable concern in a country that depends on the dairy industry for almost a quarter of its export earnings.

New Zealand's farmers warn that state-backed Chinese investors are taking advantage of the economic downturn to buy land cheaply, so that they are in a strong position for a sharp rise in global population and demand for food. China already feeds a fifth of the world's population on less than a tenth of the planet's arable land.

The Federated Farmers of New Zealand say planned Chinese purchases of arable land are unfair because foreign firms are forbidden from acquiring similarly large swathes of farmland in China.

Under the new rules, the government will introduce extra tests on overseas investment applications for "sensitive land". The buy-ups will have to be judged in relation to the nation's economic interests before approval.

Interesting.  Wonder how China will punish New Zealand?  It's far way to go to kick someone's teeth out, financially or otherwise, even for them.

Damn, I get better IR news from this one thread than the whole of the US Media.


Thanks again, Cain.

I concur.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oct/17/angela-merkel-german-multiculturalism-failed

QuoteThe German chancellor, Angela Merkel, has courted growing anti-immigrant opinion in Germany by claiming the country's attempts to create a multicultural society have "utterly failed".

Speaking to a meeting of young members of her Christian Democratic Union party, Merkel said the idea of people from different cultural backgrounds living happily "side by side" did not work.

She said the onus was on immigrants to do more to integrate into German society.

"This [multicultural] approach has failed, utterly failed," Merkel told the meeting in Potsdam, south of Berlin, yesterday.

Her remarks will stir a debate about immigration in a country which is home to around 4 million Muslims.

Last week, Horst Seehofer, the premier of Bavaria and a member of the Christian Social Union – part of Merkel's ruling coalition – called for a halt to Turkish and Arabic immigration.

In the past, Merkel has tried to straddle both sides of the argument by talking tough on integration but also calling for an acceptance of mosques.

But she faces pressure from within the CDU to take a harder line on immigrants who show resistance to being integrated into German society.

Too many easy jokes about this one.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oct/17/hamas-israel-prisoner-swap-gilad-shalit

QuoteIsrael said today it had resumed talks with the Hamas rulers of Gaza on swapping about 1,000 Palestinian prisoners for a captive soldier held for more than four years.

Prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu said the German mediator who has been working to broker a deal for a year has returned to the region.

Hamas-linked militants captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in June 2006 in a raid across the Gaza-Israel border. Secret negotiations over a swap, mediated by Egypt and more recently by Germany, have been deadlocked for several months. Hamas is not part of US-sponsored peace talks that restarted last month in Washington.

Deals proposed in the past have entailed Israel swapping about 1,000 Palestinian prisoners for Shalit.

The most recent talks broke down over Israel's refusal to release a number of prisoners who carried out deadly attacks on civilians because of fears they would return to violence. Hamas insists these prisoners be part of any deal.

Hamas are, of course, playing directly into Israel's hands by setting ridiculous demands for the return of Shalit, who isn't exactly a high use hostage in terms of propaganda or advancing the Palestinian cause.  Of course, Israel don't want to strike a deal with Hamas, so they're not exactly going to point this out.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oct/18/china-xi-jinping-military-commission

QuoteChinese politicians have appointed the vice-president, Xi Jinping, to a key military position, state media reported today, reinforcing expectations that he will become the country's next leader.

Xi has long been expected to take over when Hu Jintao steps down as party general secretary in 2012 and as president the following year.

The state news agency Xinhua announced that Xi had become a vice-chairman of the central military commission, which oversees the People's Liberation Army, after a four-day meeting of the party's central committee.

Xi, 57, is a "princeling", the son of a party veteran, Xi Zhongxun, who was an ally of Deng Xiaoping and helped to oversee the economic opening process in southern China. Xi Jinping was sent to the countryside as an educated youth during the cultural revolution and later studied chemical engineering at the prestigious Tsinghua University, going on to gain a law doctorate.

He was party secretary of Fujian and Zhejiang provinces before taking the top job in Shanghai when Chen Liangyu was brought down by a corruption case. Months later Xi joined the party's standing committee and took responsibility for the Olympics. It was around that time that Henry Paulson, the then US treasury secretary, described him as "the kind of guy who knows how to get things over the goal line".

Xi's wife, Peng Liyuan, is a popular folk singer. In an official magazine she described him as frugal, hard-working and down-to-earth.

Overseas, Xi may be best known for remarks that were never reported by China's state media. On a foreign trip last spring, he told his audience: "There are some well-fed foreigners who have nothing better to do than point fingers at our affairs. China does not, first, export revolution; second, export poverty and hunger; third, cause troubles for you. What else is there to say?"

Interesting, for sure.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oct/18/iran-iraq-maliki-ahmadinejad-sadr

QuoteIran has for the first time publicly backed Nouri al-Maliki to lead Iraq for a second term, hours after Maliki arrived in Tehran today for a rare meeting with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Maliki is due to travel to Qom later to meet his former foe turned ally Moqtada al-Sadr, who has aligned his powerful political bloc with Maliki's coalition.

The Guardian revealed yesterday that Iran had brokered a deal between Sadr and Maliki and had recently used its sway with Syria and Hezbollah in Lebanon in an attempt to shut out US input into a new government.

The revelations of increased Iranian involvement in Iraq at a time when the departing US military is scaling back its influence have caused ripples inside Iraq, where Maliki's visit is being cast by the Iraqi media as a job application.

So, how's that "invading Iraq to turn it into a vassal state" thing working out?

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/smuggler-forger-writer-spy/8267/

QuoteAnas Aremeyaw Anas is a Ghanaian investigative journalist with many disguises—from addict to imam—and one overriding mission: to force Ghana's government to act against the lawbreakers he exposes.

Most awesome reporter EVER.

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2010/10/an-ugly-answer-to-israels-arab-problem/64554/

QuoteLast Sunday, the Israeli cabinet approved a controversial new draft law that would require non-Jews hoping to become Israeli citizens to swear a loyalty oath to the nation as a democratic and--here's the ugly bit--Jewish state.

The measure, which is aimed at foreign Arabs who come to Israeli in order to marry local Muslims or Christians, was originally proposed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's ultra-nationalist coalition partner, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman: a settler who ran for office on the ominous slogan of "Only Lieberman Understands Arabic." Since the cabinet vote, the new bill has been denounced around the world--but the loudest criticism has come from within Israel itself.

Aluf Benn, writing in the left-leaning Ha'aretz, has argued that the move represents an attempt by Netanyahu to so alienate Israel's Arab citizens that they abandon the political process, thereby strengthening the Israeli right (since Arabs tend to vote Labor). Benn's colleague, Carlo Strenger, has gone even further, claiming that the bill betrays a fundamental hatred of liberal values on the part of the government.

Urgh.

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2010/10/how-we-lost-afghanistans-once-peaceful-north/64257/

QuoteOn Friday, a bomb blast at a crowded mosque in Afghanistan's Takhar province killed 20 people, among them Governor Mohammed Omar of neighboring Kunduz province. Far more alarming than the senior official's death is where it happened: both Takhar and Kunduz are in Afghanistan's north, which until very recently had been a haven from the violence marring the rest of the country. Once a place where Westerners could wander the countryside relatively unmolested by terrorism, the Taliban, or homemade bombs, the north of Afghanistan has become very dangerous in just the last two years. With the U.S.- and NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) focusing nearly all of its efforts on the south and east of Afghanistan, that inattention has allowed the insurgency to creep into the north and fill the vacuum left by poor security and weak governance. As if this were not enough, the deterioration of the ethnically diverse north reveals that one of the assumptions most central to the effort in Afghanistan is fundamentally and disastrously wrong.

Foust is one of the few people in the media actually worth listening to about Afghanistan, as he's been there, speaks the languages and knows the history.  Unlike 99% of self-proclaimed "Afghanistan experts", whose skill extends to reading about the British Occupation on Wikipedia, at best.

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/10/sats-spot-3-miles-of-nato-supply-trucks-bottlenecked-in-pakistan/

QuotePakistan's 10-day blockade against NATO convoys has ended, but a new video released by a commercial satellite company shows just how massive the consequences were: a sprawling, three-mile bottleneck of oil tankers and supply trucks, some parked in a dry riverbed, waiting to cross the Torkham border pass into Afghanistan.

The Soviets had plenty of fuckups when it came to their war in Afghanistan, but I'm pretty sure even they didn't screw up quite this badly.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-10-18/philippines-may-lose-600-000-tons-of-rice-from-typhoon-megi-official-says.html

QuoteThe Philippines, the world's biggest rice buyer, may lose 600,000 metric tons of the crop as Supertyphoon Megi, the strongest to hit the nation this year, strikes some of the nation's biggest producing areas, a government official said. Rice futures advanced.

"Once the typhoon hits those areas, the crop will be affected," Agriculture Undersecretary Antonio Fleta said in a phone interview from Manila. "Even if farmers harvest the damaged rice, they'd have a hard time drying the grain. There may not be much left to sell."

About 157,000 hectares of land planted to rice in Cagayan and Isabela provinces may be in the path of the typhoon, Fleta said. Megi has sustained winds of 270 kilometers (168 miles) per hour, the U.S. Navy Joint Typhoon Warning Center said, making it a Category 5 storm capable of catastrophic damage.

Half of the planted areas in the two provinces are ready for harvest and the rest are in the reproductive stage, leaving them susceptible to damage, Fleta said.

Ofuk.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/19/world/africa/19somalia.html?_r=1&ref=world

QuoteThe struggling transitional government and its allies have undertaken a limited offensive against radical Islamist insurgents, attacking their positions in several places over the past few days, Somali officials and witnesses said on Monday.

The fighting started on Saturday near the Kenyan border, and by Sunday night at least one town, Belet Hawo, had switched hands, with government-allied militias pushing out the insurgents. The development appeared to be an unexpected setback for an insurgent movement that has been emboldened in recent months by the dysfunction of the government in this chronically unstable country.

Much of Somalia is ruled by the Shabab, a group of radical Islamist rebels who have sworn allegiance to Al Qaeda. Somalia's government barely controls just a few blocks of the capital.

This is going to be a curb-stomp battle.  Again.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/18/world/asia/18kabul.html?ref=world

QuoteKABUL, Afghanistan — Although the preliminary results of the Sept. 18 parliamentary elections, expected to be announced Sunday, were postponed, interviews with Afghan and Western officials indicate that fraud was pervasive and that nearly 25 percent of the votes are likely to be thrown out.

The fraud, which included ballot-box stuffing, citizens forced to cast their votes at gunpoint, corrupt election officials and security forces complicit with corrupt candidates, is expected to mean that 800,000 to a million votes will be nullified, according to two Western officials who are following the election closely.

DEMOCRACY!

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/10/18/world/asia/AP-AS-Myanmar-Election.html?ref=world

QuoteForeign journalists will not be allowed into Myanmar to cover the military-ruled country's first election in 20 years, election officials said Monday, issuing the latest restriction for an election widely criticized as a sham.

The Election Commission said there was no need to grant visas for foreign reporters because there are local reporters in the country who work for foreign media. The commission also reiterated that it was "not necessary" for foreign observers to monitor the elections.

The ruling military junta has billed the election as a key step toward democracy after five decades of military rule. Critics say that oppressive rules governing campaigning, the repression of the main opposition party and other elements ensure that the army will continue its commanding influence after the polls.

DEMOCRACY!

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/18/world/europe/18iht-germany.html?ref=world

QuoteBERLIN — Ahead of a summit meeting Monday in Deauville, France, between the leaders of Germany, Russia and France, Moscow is asking for regular participation in the European Union committee that is responsible for setting the bloc's foreign policy.

"We would like Russia and the E.U. to be able to take joint decisions," Vladimir Chizhov, Moscow's ambassador to the European Union, said in a telephone interview with the International Herald Tribune over the weekend from Brussels. "I don't expect to be sitting at every session of the political and security committee, but there should be some mechanism that would enable us to take joint steps."

Such arrangements would mark a major change in E.U.-Russia relations, which have been held back because of divisions inside the 27-member bloc over how to deal with Russia. They might also go some way to meet Russia's calls for a new security architecture, a move aimed at gaining a greater say in strategic issues in Europe.

DEMOCRA-Uh, sorry.  Not entirely surprising, this suggests continuity between Putin and Medvedev, at least in foreign policy towards the EU.  America wont like this, though.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,723695,00.html

QuoteThe world is gathered in Japan this week in an effort to put an end to the extinction of plant and animal species across the globe. But while everyone agrees that biodiversity is important, the conference may fail anyway -- partially because the Americans don't seem interested.

The group dressed in blue had arranged themselves in a row before Berlin's Brandenburg Gate. In front of each of the activists was a large photo of an animal species now extinct: an aurochs, a Chinese river dolphin, an ivory-billed woodpecker. In the background fluttered a banner reading "stop extinction," a couple of candles had been set up, some flowers and a few stuffed animals. A photogenic protest that was accompanied by mournful trumpet music.

The small demonstration was put on last Thursday by Germany's Nature and Biodiversity Conservation Union, just one of the myriad environmentalist groups around the world warming up for the summit on the Convention on Biological Diversity which begins in Nagoya, Japan on Monday. They say that pressure from the public is badly needed -- because even as the 11-day conference gets underway, its chances for success appear to be slim.

As with the international climate negotiations which ended in fiasco last year in Copenhagen, the biodiversity talks in Nagoya could well end in political stalemate -- as the situation in numerous ecosystems around the world gets worse and worse. Already, 20 percent of the planet's 380,000 plant species are in danger of becoming extinct, primarily due to habitat destruction caused by the world's growing population. Of 5,490 species of mammals, 1,130 are threatened and 70 percent of the world's fish population is in danger from over-fishing.

Pffft, biodiversity is for sissies.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,721582,00.html

QuoteKazakhstan has oil, coal and uranium -- and a capital full of stunning architecture. President Nursultan Nazarbayev hopes his country can become the region's leading economy, but his heavy-handed cult of personality is not universally welcomed. Others worry about China's growing influence.

One of Dick Cheney's favourite country's, is Kazakhstan.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,722880,00.html

QuoteBudapest survived fascism and communism and blossomed after the fall of the Iron Curtain. But the Hungarian capital is experiencing a rebirth of anti-Semitism. The far-right Jobbik is now the country's third largest party and Jews are being openly intimidated.

The city was always good for drama -- for intrigues about life and death, for eternal love and murderous betrayal, for torture, political heroism and sexual escapades. Founded by the Romans, destroyed by the Mongols and oppressed by the Ottoman Turks, Budapest has reinvented itself time and again, flexible in the flux of time. It has also served as a laboratory of sorts for varying political ideologies, from National Socialism to fascism to communism.

The United Nations has named four spots in the city UNESCO world heritage sites: the panorama on the Danube River embankment, the Buda castle district, the Millennium underground railway and Andrássy Avenue. The Hungarians wanted to use the magnificent boulevard, which was designed and built as part of preparations for the nation's mythical millennium celebration in 1896, to demonstrate that they had assumed their rightful place in the center of the continent. The country fell to the Nazis 40 years later. The Arrow Cross Party, a Hungarian national socialist party briefly in power from October 1944 to March 1945, was still driving Jews into extermination camps after Adolf Eichmann, the "architect of the Holocaust," had already fled.

Jobbik and the British BNP are best buddies, incidentally.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/tax-investigation-could-land-pope-with-83648bn-bill-2106113.html

QuoteEight billion euros worth of tax breaks pocketed by the Catholic Church in Italy could be in breach of European law and may have to be repaid, it has emerged.

The development is the latest blow to an institution that has been rocked by an annus horribilis following the global clerical paedophilia scandal that broke earlier this year, and investigations into money laundering.

The European Commission has said that tax relief on 100,000 Italian properties enjoyed by the Holy See since 2005 was under the spotlight, after announcing an "in-depth" investigation.

lol pwnd

Re previous page: everything's coming apart at the seams, isn't it?

This page: information overload after the first few paragraphs and I didn't even click the links. may read them later.

Cain, the best part about this links thread is that most of them come from pretty reputable sources like BBC, WSJ and NYT. Well, reputable in the sense that when I talk to people about how fucked everything is, they can't ignore it cause it's some kind of left wing indymedia paranoia zine.

Yeah.  Of course, if they knew how the BBC, NYT etc put out stories directly written by Reuters, Associated Press and the Press Association without factchecking, by those news agencies or by the journalists, or how media directives demand a story be factchecked, put on a ticker, put on the web and written in preparation for putting on air in five minutes(!), how only 12% of reporters actually write their own stories and how 90%~ of political reporting in some parts of the UK is taken directly from government PR offices....well then, they'd realize the BBC is only vaguely more trustworthy than some twit on Indymedia with a naff haircut and a trust fund (which is in no way praise of Indymedia).

Anyone who actually wants to talk about the news should be forced to read Nick Davies Flat Earth News first, and then pass a written and verbal test on it.  It's horrifying how badly run, understaffed and easily duped some of the world's most powerful news services really are.

Which, interestingly, has some amusing connotations for "open source intelligence" that I hadn't considered before.  We've basically created a free market Cold War, with disinformation being fed to every side which is then used as the basis for policy which then must be protected via disinformation which is then used as the basis for policy which....you get the idea.

Quote from: Cain on October 20, 2010, 02:41:26 PMYeah.  Of course, if they knew how the BBC, NYT etc put out stories directly written by Reuters, Associated Press and the Press Association without factchecking, by those news agencies or by the journalists, or how media directives demand a story be factchecked, put on a ticker, put on the web and written in preparation for putting on air in five minutes(!), how only 12% of reporters actually write their own stories and how 90%~ of political reporting in some parts of the UK is taken directly from government PR offices....well then, they'd realize the BBC is only vaguely more trustworthy than some twit on Indymedia with a naff haircut and a trust fund (which is in no way praise of Indymedia).

Yes, I sort of figured that. Still people are more prone to believe the link if it comes from those domains :)

Quote from: Cain on October 20, 2010, 02:43:43 PMWhich, interestingly, has some amusing connotations for "open source intelligence" that I hadn't considered before.  We've basically created a free market Cold War, with disinformation being fed to every side which is then used as the basis for policy which then must be protected via disinformation which is then used as the basis for policy which....you get the idea.

No. I'm stupid (and my head's filled with snot) but "open source intelligence" = bloggers? What's "free market Cold War" mean? And policy based on disinfo must be protected by more disinfo? It's probably really obvious, but this is not one of my strong points (news+politics).

Does it mean we gotta resurrect AWS:OM? :)

Open Source Intelligence means getting intelligence from newspapers, bloggers...basically anything available in the public domain.  Even given the stupidity of the news services, a surprising number of vitally important facts are easily and freely available.

During the Cold War, each side was producing so much disinformation about their intentions it was almost impossible to tell what was truly going on.  Policy would then get based on that (dis)information, which of course, would not align with what was really going on, but because other disinformation would be created to hide the real policies, which would then create a reaction on the other side, causing ever more muddled and confused pictures of enemy intentions to appear, it quickly became impossible to distinguish between fact and fiction.  We've now replicated that scenario by allowing PR companies and departments to write the news, since one of the main responsibilities of any competent PR agency is, in fact, news suppression.  Since intelligence agencies are gathering that "news" and using it to make analysis which then feeds into policy...well, you can see the implications, I am sure.

Yes, feedback loops of chaos confusion and disorder. The twenty-first century ... :D

Fukishima is off the news, but that doesn't mean things aren't still bad

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303678704576441682767970202.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

QuoteJapan grappled with a fresh radiation scare Tuesday, as authorities found that beef contaminated with radioactive cesium had been shipped to shops and restaurants throughout the country.

The beef, from six cattle raised on a farm near the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, registered radioactive-cesium levels up to seven times that permitted by Japanese food-safety standards. Some of the meat had already likely been eaten, government officials said.

Speaking of which...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/jul/13/fukushima-nuclear-gypsies-engineers-labourers

QuoteFour months on from the start of the world's worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl, this hot-spring resort in north-east Japan has been transformed into a dormitory for 2,000 men who have travelled from across the country to take part in the clean-up effort 30 miles away at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant.

Iwaki-Yumoto has come to resemble corporate Japan in microcosm. Among its newest residents are technicians and engineers with years of experience and, underpinning them all, hundreds of labourers lured from across Japan by the prospect of higher wages.

They include Ariyoshi Rune, a tall, wiry 47-year-old truck driver whose slicked-back hair and sideburns are inspired by his idol, Joe Strummer.

For five days a week, Rune is in thrall to the drudgery of life as a "nuclear gypsy", the name writer Kunio Horie gave to contract workers who have traditionally performed the dirtiest, most dangerous jobs for Japan's power utilities.

The industry has relied on temporary workers for maintenance and repair work since the nuclear plant construction boom in the 1970s. Now, as then, those from the lowest rungs of Japanese society work for meagre wages, with little training or experience of hazardous environments.

Warning shot for the USA

http://content.usatoday.com/communities/theoval/post/2011/07/moodys-puts-bond-rating-on-review-for-possible-downgrade/1?csp=34news

QuoteAs President Obama and congressional leaders haggled over the nation's $14.3 trillion debt ceiling this afternoon, they got a stark reminder of the financial stakes.

Moody's Investors Service has placed the nation's Aaa bond rating on review for possible downgrade, citing "the rising possibility that the statutory debt limit will not be raised on a timely basis, leading to a default on Treasury debt obligations."

Common sense may be present in EU decision-making yet

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Europe-considers-Greek-rb-233272100.html

QuoteEuropean Union leaders are poised to hold an emergency summit after finance ministers acknowledged for the first time that some form of Greek default may be needed to cut Athens' debts and stop contagion to Italy and Spain.

"There will be an extra summit this Friday," a senior euro zone diplomat told Reuters, suggesting policymakers have been seized with a new sense of urgency after markets started targeting Italian assets.

BOOM! HEADSHOT!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/karzais-brother-killed-by-guard-in-kandahar-home/2011/07/12/gIQAgI3FAI_story.html?hpid=z1

QuoteThe half-brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai was assassinated by a trusted local security official Tuesday, a political killing that was immediately claimed by the Taliban and makes grimly clear the vulnerability of Afghan officials as the United States prepares to reduce its military presence.

Ahmed Wali Karzai — head of Kandahar's provincial council and widely considered the most powerful man in southern Afghanistan — was meeting with tribal elders and politicians in his heavily fortified home in downtown Kandahar city Tuesday morning, according to two people at the house at the time.

Sardar Mohammad, a longtime confidant and commander of the police post near Karzai's ancestral home, arrived and requested a private discussion, officials said. Karzai and Mohammad left for another room, and soon three gunshots rang out.

Agha Lalai Destegeri, the deputy provincial council chief, said he rushed in to find Karzai shot in the head, chest and hand.

Karzai's other guards entered the room and shot and killed Mohammad, officials said. A bleeding Karzai was driven by his entourage a short distance across town to Mirwais Hospital, but he did not survive, Destegeri and other Afghan officials said.

The Taliban have a few words on this story, incidentally...

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/MG16Df02.html

QuoteThe Taliban have issued a statement offering an explanation for the assassination in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar of Ahmad Wali Karzai, the younger half-brother of President Hamid Karzai.

This statement was released on Thursday - the same day a suicide bomber disrupted the memorial service in Kandahar for Ahmad Wali, killing three people, including Maulawi Ekmatullah, the head of the local ulema shura (provincial religious council).

Earlier, the burial of Ahmad Wali on Tuesday, attended by President Karzai, passed off without incident. But the Taliban targeted the memorial service, which was held for those who were had traveled from remote places and couldn't attend the funeral.

Direct references in the Taliban statement to the Afghan president were conspicuous in their absence. The focus was almost entirely on Ahmad Wali, since the Taliban wanted the Afghan elites to draw the necessary conclusions as to why the 49-year-old head of Kandahar's elected provincial council had to be eliminated.

The Taliban squarely and unambiguously blamed the assassination on the fact that Ahmad Wali worked for the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Interestingly, the whole world is focusing on Ahmad Wali as an archetypal Afghan "warlord" and fascinating yarns are being churned out by the hour on the amorphous phenomenon of Afghan "warlordism"; but the Taliban zero in on the kernel of the truth. Nothing else about Ahmad Wali matters to them.

Indeed, the Taliban expose that Ahmad Wali was a "kingpin of the regime in south Afghanistan" in his capacity as the leader of the provincial council. He was the "most trusted person" of the US-led coalition forces occupying Afghanistan.

The Taliban point out that Ahmad Wali cooperated with the "Americans, Canadians and Britons" in the latters' campaign to gain control of the southwestern region of Afghanistan - not only Kandahar. (The governor of Helmand province, Gulab Mangal, was targeted in Maiwand district with an improvised explosive device as he was travelling to Kandahar on Tuesday to attend Ahmad Wali's funeral.)

Ahmad Wali obviously crossed the "red line" in helping US commander General David Petraeus' troop surge. The Taliban said he "played a key role in spreading the net of intelligence of the Western invaders and boosting their sway in southwest Afghanistan".

But the clincher was that this wasn't retribution for past sins. "Even now, he [Ahmad Wali] received a high salary from the CIA." This is as close as the Taliban get to suggesting that they apprehended that with Petraeus' elevation as the head of the CIA, Ahmad Wali would have an even greater potential to inflict damage on their interests. What emerges is that Ahmad Wali has paid with his life the political cost of the measure of success that Petraeus can claim for his "surge" policy in southwestern Afghanistan.

Hmmm....

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jul/11/cia-fake-vaccinations-osama-bin-ladens-dna

QuoteThe CIA organised a fake vaccination programme in the town where it believed Osama bin Laden was hiding in an elaborate attempt to obtain DNA from the fugitive al-Qaida leader's family, a Guardian investigation has found.

As part of extensive preparations for the raid that killed Bin Laden in May, CIA agents recruited a senior Pakistani doctor to organise the vaccine drive in Abbottabad, even starting the "project" in a poorer part of town to make it look more authentic, according to Pakistani and US officials and local residents.

The doctor, Shakil Afridi, has since been arrested by the Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) for co-operating with American intelligence agents.

Oh ho HO!  Blackwater just went all bi-partisan and shit

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/07/new-hire-for-blackwater-bill-clintons-lawyer/

QuoteBlackwater's rebranding continues at a torrid pace. Danger Room has learned the latest Washington greybeard hired to spruce up the image of the world's most infamous private security firm is Jack Quinn, a top Washington lobbyist and former White House counsel to President Bill Clinton.

Now renamed Xe and owned by an investor consortium called USTC Holdings, the company is bringing Quinn — pictured left, with Rep. Joe Crowley — onto its board as an "independent director." He'll focus on "governance and oversight," keeping the company out of trouble, especially with the government. USTC Holdings' Jason DeYonker says that Quinn's reputation for "commitment to the highest ethical standards of conduct in both the public and private sectors" makes him a great fit.

To be cynical about it, a man who gave legal advice to Clinton knows a whole lot about crisis management. Which is important, since Xe intends to keep providing security to U.S. diplomats in dangerous places – activities that, under its old leadership, led its guards into a shooting debacle that killed 17 Iraqi civilians in 2007.

This is going to hurt.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/10/us-eurozone-idUSTRE7691HM20110710

QuoteEuropean Council President Herman Van Rompuy has called an emergency meeting of top officials dealing with the euro zone debt crisis for Monday morning, reflecting concern that the crisis could spread to Italy, the region's third largest economy.

European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet will attend the meeting along with Jean-Claude Juncker, chairman of the region's finance ministers, European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso and Olli Rehn, the economic and monetary affairs commissioner, three official sources told Reuters.

Van Rompuy's spokesman Dirk De Backer said: "It's a coordination, not a crisis meeting." He added that Italy would not be on the agenda and declined to say what would be discussed.

However, two official sources told Reuters that the situation in Italy would be discussed. The talks were organized after a sharp sell-off in Italian assets on Friday, which has increased fears that Italy, with the highest sovereign debt ratio relative to its economy in the euro zone after Greece, could be next to suffer in the crisis. A second international bailout of Greece will also be discussed, the sources said.

Uh huh.  And I'm sure this "new internet" wouldn't be abused at all.

http://www.nextgov.com/nextgov/ng_20110706_1137.php?oref=topnews

QuoteThe United States may seriously want to consider creating a new Internet infrastructure to reduce the threat of cyberattacks, said Michael Hayden, President George W. Bush's CIA director.

Several current federal officials, including U.S. Cyber Command chief Gen. Keith Alexander, also have floated the concept of a ".secure" network for critical services such as banking that would be walled off from the public Web. Unlike .com, .xxx and other new domains now proliferating the Internet, .secure would require visitors to use certified credentials for entry and would do away with users' Fourth Amendment rights to privacy. Network operators in the financial sector, for example, would be authorized to scan account holders' traffic content for signs of trouble. The current Internet setup would remain intact for people who prefer to stay anonymous on the Web.

This sounds like a really dumb idea

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2011/07/vietnam-era-weapon-being-used-to-clear-the-amazon.php

QuoteAgent Orange is one of the most devastating weapons of modern warfare, a chemical which killed or injured an estimated 400,000 people during the Vietnam War — and now it's being used against the Amazon rainforest. According to officials, ranchers in Brazil have begun spraying the highly toxic herbicide over patches of forest as a covert method to illegally clear foliage, more difficult to detect that chainsaws and tractors. In recent weeks, an aerial survey detected some 440 acres of rainforest that had been sprayed with the compound — poisoning thousands of trees and an untold number of animals, potentially for generations.

Officials from Brazil's environmental agency IBAMA were first tipped to the illegal clearing by satellite images of the forest in Amazonia; a helicopter flyover in the region later revealed thousands of trees left ash-colored and defoliated by toxic chemicals. IBAMA says that Agent Orange was likely dispersed by aircraft by a yet unidentified rancher to clear the land for pasture because it is more difficult to detect than traditional operations that require chainsaws and tractors.

Well, it's probably better than getting shot in the head by Israeli commandos

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jul/04/greek-coastguard-gaza-freedom-flotilla

QuoteAn attempt by one of the Gaza-bound "freedom flotilla" ships to defy the Greek government and escape from port was thwarted on Monday when armed coastguard officials caught up with the vessel and forced it back to shore.

On a day that activists had dubbed "make or break" for the international coalition of boats seeking to break Israel's blockade of Gaza, the Canadian ship Tahrir burst out of Agios Nikolaos port in Crete at 6pm local time after supporters blocked the coastguard with manned kayaks.

"We have left port [and] are full steam ahead – coastguard boat about 5-10 [minutes] behind us," announced passengers on the ship's official Twitter feed as they raced towards international waters. But the faster coastguard boat caught up with the Tahrir and prevented it from going any further.

"Our boat has just been illegally boarded by armed members of the Greek coastguard and commandeered against our will," Dylan Penner, a member of Tahrir steering committee, told the Guardian by phone from the ship's deck. "This is conclusive evidence that Israel's unlawful siege on Gaza has now been extended to Greece."

The captain of a US ship, The Audacity of Hope, was arrested after a similar failed attempt to flee the port in Athens last week.

The Greek government caused controversy on Friday when it banned all flotilla ships from leaving its ports, without explaining its reasons. Critics accused the beleaguered government of bowing to Israeli and US pressure and surrendering Greek sovereignty over its sea borders. The Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, thanked his Greek counterpart for helping to stamp out "anti-Israeli provocation".

Invest in rice, or, most shameless act of vote-buying in history.  You decide.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-07-04/rice-may-rally-56-as-pro-thaksin-party-sweeps-to-power-in-thai-elections.html

QuoteRice prices in Thailand, the biggest exporter, may rally 56 percent by yearend as the party that won parliamentary elections implements a policy to buy the crop from farmers above current rates, according to a survey.

The export price may climb to $810 per metric ton by Dec. 31, according to a median forecast of six millers, exporters and traders today and yesterday, who commented after Pheu Thai won a majority in yesterday's contest. "We are ready to implement all policies we have announced," Yingluck Shinawatra, who will become Thailand's first female prime minister, said yesterday.

Costlier rice from Thailand, which accounts for about 30 percent of worldwide shipments, may increase global food costs while making supplies from rival Vietnam more competitive. A Bloomberg survey last month, conducted during the campaign, suggested a gain to $750 per ton if Pheu Thai were to win.

"It isn't only Thai prices that will go up, the rest of the world will have to follow," Mamadou Ciss, chief executive officer of Hermes Investments Pte, said from Geneva. The price may jump $100 within two months and peak at $700, said Ciss, who correctly predicted in 2006 that prices would double.

Thai export prices are a benchmark for the industry. The price of the 100 percent grade-B variety, which is set weekly, was at $519 per ton on June 29, and has risen as much as 7.3 percent since outgoing Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva called the election. Abhisit's Democrat Party won 160 seats in the 500- member parliament while Pheu Thai took 264, with 98 percent of the vote counted.

Ah yes, our democratic and peace-loving allies Sudan...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/libya/8611199/Sudanese-army-seizes-southern-Libyan-town.html

QuoteThe Sudanese army has seized a town in southern Libya that is the gateway to oilfields crucial to rebel hopes of establishing financial independence.

Officials overseeing the no-fly zone enforced by Nato over Libya said the Sudanese move north of border had not encountered resistance from troops loyal to Col Muammar Gaddafi.

Since the February uprising against his regime, the Libyan leader's forces have been concentrated around Tripoli, the capital; Sirte, the eastern town that is Col Gaddafi's birthplace and Sebha, the desert outpost where the dictator grew up.

Officials said control of the town of Kufra and nearby military base granted the Sudanese a key strategic foothold between the regime and the opposition Transitional National Council (TNC) which holds the eastern seaboard and a series of rebel enclaves.

Breaking news: world economy fucked

http://www.smh.com.au/business/global-train-wreck-coming-20110630-1gszi.html

QuoteTHE global economy is facing "a slow-motion train wreck" with Greece only the first nation to be hit, Reserve Bank director Warwick McKibbin has told a Melbourne conference.

Referring to the most recent global economic crisis as a mere "blip", he said the coming crisis could undo the mining boom and bring on inflation of the kind not seen since the 1970s.

This probably wasn't Ilyas Kashmiri.  But if you're wondering why Mumbai gets attacked so often, it should be mentioned that the ISI has a strong presence in the organized crime underworld there

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/MG15Df01.html

QuoteLike a deadly unwanted relative refusing to sever connections, terrorism revisited Mumbai after nearly three years, with three bomb blasts on the evening of July 13. Twenty-one people have died in the explosions and over 140 injured. The death toll is rising.

The bombs exploded at around 6.45 pm: outside a school bus stop in suburban Dadar, the busy jewelry market zone of Zaveri Bazar and the diamond trading district at the Opera House area in south Mumbai. The timing and location of the explosives showed intent to target heavily crowded areas during rush hour.

Mumbai police commissioner Arup Patnaik told media personnel at the blast sites that the bombs at Zaveri Bazaar and Opera House seemed to have been high-intensity improvised explosive devices (IEDs), judging by the damage in the two areas. The Dadar bus stop bomb was of relatively lower intensity. The bombs exploded within 10 minutes of each other, Patnaik confirmed.

No terrorist group has yet claimed responsibility for the blasts, and no suspects have been officially named. From the familiar pattern of the attacks, security agencies unofficially mentioned the involvement of the so-called Indian Mujahideen. But this group of killers, said to be supported by, or a front for, the Pakistani terrorist outfit Lakshar-e-Taiba, has not sent its trademark e-mail to media outlets claiming credit for this latest exhibition of terror.

Well, some good news, at least

http://stress-test.eba.europa.eu/pdf/EBA_ST_2011_Summary_Report_v6.pdf

QuoteThe data from the sample of 90 banks (Dec. 2010) shows the aggregate exposure-at-default (EAD) Greek sovereign debt outstanding at EUR98.2 bn. Sixty-seven percent of Greek sovereign debt (and 69% of the much smaller Greek interbank position) is in fact held by domestic banks (about 20% refers to loans which are mostly guaranteed by sovereign). The aggregate EAD exposure is EUR52.7 bn for Ireland (61% held domestically) and EUR43.2 bn (63% held domestically) for Portugal. Importantly, EAD exposures are different from similar exposures reported on a gross basis in the disclosure templates ...

Given the distribution of the exposures described above, the direct first-order impact, even under harsh scenarios, would primarily be on the home-banks of countries experiencing the most severe widening of credit spreads. In such cases the capital shortfall should be easily covered with credible back stop mechanisms such as the support packages already issued or being defined for Ireland, Portugal and Greece. In this context these countries have announced capital enhancement measures requiring banks to hold capital to a higher level than that used for the EBA's EU wide stress test. Additional capital strengthening measures have been, and will be, announced to ensure this.

Someone's hilariously overconfident

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/07/the-panetta-doctrine-declare-victory-dont-go-home/

QuoteLeon Panetta is setting the mother of all goals for himself at the Pentagon. He began his first tour of Iraq and Afghanistan as defense secretary with an earthquake of a declaration: the U.S. is thisclose from finally destroying al-Qaida.

It sounds almost hysterically optimistic. But to understand why Panetta might make such a sweeping statement, and to figure out what it means for an endgame for the war on terrorism, follow the money.

The terrorists are behind the eight ball, Panetta told reporters on his way to Afghanistan. "We're within reach of strategically defeating al-Qaida," he said on Saturday, "and I'm hoping to be able to focus on that, working, obviously, with my prior agency as well."

So fuel up the drones and prepare the CIA-Joint Special Operations Command task forces. Delivering the final blow to the U.S.' main adversary of the last decade is a matter of taking down "somewhere around 10 to 20 key leaders," Panetta said, lurking in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and North Africa.

Notice that's much further than White House counterterrorism chief John Brennan would go during a similar boast. Brennan said two weeks ago that killing Osama bin Laden makes it possible to envision an end to al-Qaida, but never that the terror network was fewer than two dozen operatives from extinction.

Panetta has to know he's flirting with an epic fail. The U.S. doesn't have a great track record at judging progress against al-Qaida by pointing to terror leaders taken off the board. Somehow al-Qaida soldiers on even after the U.S. repeatedly kills whomever becomes its number-three leader. If Navy SEALs do another 20 double-taps and there's another al-Qaida strike afterward, Panetta's getting his face Photoshopped onto George W. Bush aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln in front of a "Mission Accomplished" banner.

Speaking of Iraq...

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/07/its-friday-and-iraq-still-isnt-asking-the-military-to-stay/

QuoteDefense Secretary Leon Panetta has tried everything, including using very mild quasi-profanity. But Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki still isn't requesting U.S. troops to stay past their scheduled December 2011 withdrawal. And a new, sneakier gambit by the Iraqis to extend their stay isn't going to work.

The big message Panetta wanted to send to the Iraqis during his first trip to Baghdad was "Damn it, make a decision" on asking the U.S. to prolongue its Iraqi adventure. (It's the quote that launched a million tiresome articles about Panetta's "saltiness.") That was last weekend. The snarled, fraught anti-American Iraqi politics that make it dangerous for Maliki to issue such a request have mysteriously yet to smooth out.

But here's how Maliki seeks to circumvent them. Now he's saying that he doesn't need parliamentary approval for the U.S. to leave behind some unknown number of troops to train their Iraqi counterparts in using all the F-16s and air defense systems the U.S. will sell Iraq. Clever!

Alas, the U.S. says that's not going to cut it. "We have not gotten a formal request from the Government of Iraq," Pentagon spokesman Col. David Lapan tells Danger Room.


The dynamics of the U.S.-Iraqi inability to break up are approaching peak dysfunction. A host of U.S. military officials all but beg the Iraqis to let them stay. They claim that in private discussions, the Iraqis assure them that they want a residual U.S. force, but they can't say it in public.

Worse, the U.S. claims Iran is flooding Iraq with weapons so it'll looks like their Shiite allies are chasing the Americans into a long-schedule departure. Which just increases the U.S.' resolve to stay, even as Iraq gets more dangerous for U.S. troops — as if staying longer would somehow reduce the Iranian desire to attack.

Basic lesson in relationships: when the other person doesn't want to be seen with you in public, that tells you all you need to know. Maliki's effort is a clever attempt at having it both ways, but the U.S. is holding out for a formal declaration of love. So far, the Iraqis are sending the message that they really can live without U.S. troops.

The stirrings of a new ideology in Germany...

http://www.dialoginternational.com/dialog_international/2011/07/ordo-liberalism-vs-marxism.html

QuoteSahra Wagenknecht, a leader of Germany's Left Party (die LINKE) andone of the hottest members of the Bundestag, has written a provocative book in which she seems to turn away from Marx and instead embrace Ludwig Erhard.  The book,Freiheit statt Kapitalismus("Freedom instead of Capitalism") embraces the teachings of Walter Eucken and Alfred Müller-Armack, the theorists of so-called ordo-liberalism. The theories of ordo-liberalism were developed in the 1930s as a reaction against state socialism and Nazism, but were put into practice in the early postwar period by West Germany's economics minister and chancellor Ludwig Erhard, the architect of Germany's Economic Miracle (Wirtschaftswunder).  Ordo-liberalism distinguishes itself from classical  neo-liberalism in that it promotes a social market economy where the state plays a decisive role in guaranteeing market competition. Now the market economy was no longer hostile to the common good. In her book, Sahra Wagenknecht praises competition, meritocracy and individual responsibility as defined by the ordo-liberals, whose teachings, consistently applied, supposedly lead directly to a new "creative socialism".  The problem with Germany today is that the economy is stalled in moribund capitalism, controlled by the "Ackermänner" and finance capital, which stifles competition and creativity.

Fun and games in the Levant

http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/07/14/the_other_israel_lebanon_border_conflict

QuoteOff shore, and generally off the radar, a fight is heating up between Israel and Lebanon over who controls a valuable piece of the Mediterranean that is known to have two major gas fields possibly worth billions of dollars. As always, when it comes to border issues between these two nations, the rhetoric has become heated -- and there's the fear that this could signal the next big clash between Israel and Hezbollah. Hezbollah's deputy secretary general Sheikh Naim Qassem minced no words, saying today the group "will remain vigilant in order to regain its full rights, whatever it takes."

Israel's rhetoric has been equally heated. Last year, Deputy Prime Minister Uzi Landau said Israel "would not hesitate to use our force and strength to protect...international maritime law."

Qassem's comments today were in response to Israel, which on Sunday issued a map that it plans on submitting to the United Nations. Lebanon says, though, that the Israeli map encroaches on their territory by more than 1,500 square kilometers. Last year, Lebanon submitted a map of their own to the world body -- hoping for mediation.

Israeli officials say Hezbollah, boosted by its new political clout, is trying to pick a fight with Israel as a pretext for continuing their conflict.

But Hezbollah says that Israel is trying to snatch valuable territory and that it won't be "frightened by" Israeli threats.

A resolution is tricky. There is a lot of money at stake for the two resource-poor countries -- maybe up to $90 billion worth of gas. Hezbollah's position is not dissimilar from the previous Western-backed government led by Saad Hariri, which also accused Israel of taking part of its offshore territory.

I haven't read this, don't intend to.  Pentagon cyber strategies are always embarrassing

http://www.acus.org/new_atlanticist/pentagons-new-cyber-strategy

QuoteThe Department of Defense's new cyber strategy is being released this afternoon and many cyber security professionals who read it may be disappointed that it does not say more. While there is some validity to that concern the strategy does cover important new ground on the most pressing needs such as partnering with the private sector and other nations, improving the workforce, and making a stand on defense.

The DoD has been working on far more than is in this document —which is not so much a strategy as a focus on five interrelated strategic initiatives. These are discussed below along with some of the key strengths and weaknesses in the latest of this administration's growing cyber canon.

The five strategic initiatives, or what DoD is calling the Five Pillars, should be no surprise to DoD watchers. This has been a long windup to an underarm throw, as the Pillars are essentially unchanged from what Deputy Secretary of Defense Lynn published last year in Foreign Affairs

Uh-oh...

http://www.neweurasia.net/politics-and-society/uk-embassy-employer-charged-with-illegal-gatherings-and-extremists-training-activity/

QuoteToday, July 15, Criminal Court of Mirzo Ulugbek district of Tashkent criminal court found Leonid Kudryavtsev, UK Embassy in Tashkent's Press and Public Relations department staffer, in violation of article 201 of the Uzbek Administrative Code for "violating the order of holding meetings, rallies, marches or demonstrations," and fined 80 times the minimum wage (UZS 3,978,800 or USD 2,300).

Judge S.N. Ashermatov, known for his participation in the case against VOA journalist Abdumalik Boboyev, decided that an appeal from the two so-called human rights activists, who are in fact true posers — Olga Krasnova and Konstantin Stepanov, is enough.

These two are well known for picketing in front of the UK Embassy in Tashkent against Craig Murray and his diplomatic activity, as well as sueing Freedom House, Human Rights Society of Uzbekistan (Общество Прав Человека Узбекистана — ОПЧУ), and other independent human rights activists of Uzbekistan; in the human rights society known as whistlers.

Krasnova and Stepanov claimed that trainings, meetings and other kinds of events at the UK Embassy with participation of human rights activists were intended to train future extremists and God-knows-whom.

Still not enough talk about Vietnam-China tensions

http://oilandglory.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/06/13/the_brinksmanship_in_the_south_china_sea

QuoteAbout three years ago, Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili acted rashly and triggered a war with Russia. But Saakashvili didn't think he was rash -- the United States, he was sure, had his back. He was wrong -- the U.S. had supported Georgia as a strategic bulwark for a big oil pipeline, but that differed from going to battle with a nuclear-armed former superpower. As a result, Russia seized two regions comprising a fifth of Georgian territory, and recognized them as private nations. Since then, Saakashvili has labored with mixed results to rebuild his economy, Thomas De Waal of the Carnegie Endowment writes in a comprehensive look at Saakashvili's Georgia.

Today, Vietnam is conducting live-fire drills in the South China Sea in a show that it won't be intimidated in a push-and-shove dispute with China over waters suspected of containing significant oil reserves. Over the weekend, Hanoi urged its former enemy -- the United States -- to help pull the row back from the flashpoint, reports the Financial Times' Ben Bland. In this case, the U.S. will oblige -- to a degree.

Last Friday, the U.S. State Department said it is "troubled" by the rise in tensions. Though for the last year the U.S. has met a request by southeast Asian nations to resist its instincts to defend them, as U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last summer suggested the nation was prepared to do, one can imagine a sturdy U.S. response in the Vietnam situation. Not to say that President Barack Obama would dispatch an aircraft carrier square into the disputed zone -- the U.S. will stay well back from rattling its war sword. But there could be stern new warnings from Clinton among other steps, under the presumption that Beijing will temper its behavior accordingly.

Ultimately both regions are vulnerable -- the Caucasus to Moscow, and the southeast Asian nations of the South China Sea to Beijing -- and must more or less fend for themselves. That is just one factor separating the 1990s from now. The South China Sea events demonstrate that, in a fight, China cannot rely on perceptions of its ostensible place in the new age to smooth its way out of potential confrontation. In the Caucasus, the U.S. is pragmatically prepared for all the world to observe its limits. Not so much in the South China Sea, where far more is at stake. Yet at some point, China will do more than just hang back.

Awesome. Thanks!

There is a lot brewing.

Quote from: Cain on October 18, 2010, 07:56:05 PM

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oct/17/hamas-israel-prisoner-swap-gilad-shalit

QuoteIsrael said today it had resumed talks with the Hamas rulers of Gaza on swapping about 1,000 Palestinian prisoners for a captive soldier held for more than four years.

Prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu said the German mediator who has been working to broker a deal for a year has returned to the region.

Hamas-linked militants captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in June 2006 in a raid across the Gaza-Israel border. Secret negotiations over a swap, mediated by Egypt and more recently by Germany, have been deadlocked for several months. Hamas is not part of US-sponsored peace talks that restarted last month in Washington.

Deals proposed in the past have entailed Israel swapping about 1,000 Palestinian prisoners for Shalit.

The most recent talks broke down over Israel's refusal to release a number of prisoners who carried out deadly attacks on civilians because of fears they would return to violence. Hamas insists these prisoners be part of any deal.

Hamas are, of course, playing directly into Israel's hands by setting ridiculous demands for the return of Shalit, who isn't exactly a high use hostage in terms of propaganda or advancing the Palestinian cause.  Of course, Israel don't want to strike a deal with Hamas, so they're not exactly going to point this out.

Turns out Israel are willing to trade 1000 Hamas prisoners in exchange for one captured solider. Do you think this may set a dangerous precedent Cain, or do you think Israel may prove a point with a couple of explosions/assassinations/arrests of some key targets?

Any more dangerous than Israel's repeated shooting of itself in the foot with its actions in the occupied territories?  No. 

Quote from: Cain on July 15, 2011, 06:58:14 PM
Invest in rice, or, most shameless act of vote-buying in history.  You decide.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-07-04/rice-may-rally-56-as-pro-thaksin-party-sweeps-to-power-in-thai-elections.html

QuoteRice prices in Thailand, the biggest exporter, may rally 56 percent by yearend as the party that won parliamentary elections implements a policy to buy the crop from farmers above current rates, according to a survey.

The export price may climb to $810 per metric ton by Dec. 31, according to a median forecast of six millers, exporters and traders today and yesterday, who commented after Pheu Thai won a majority in yesterday's contest. "We are ready to implement all policies we have announced," Yingluck Shinawatra, who will become Thailand's first female prime minister, said yesterday.

Costlier rice from Thailand, which accounts for about 30 percent of worldwide shipments, may increase global food costs while making supplies from rival Vietnam more competitive. A Bloomberg survey last month, conducted during the campaign, suggested a gain to $750 per ton if Pheu Thai were to win.

"It isn't only Thai prices that will go up, the rest of the world will have to follow," Mamadou Ciss, chief executive officer of Hermes Investments Pte, said from Geneva. The price may jump $100 within two months and peak at $700, said Ciss, who correctly predicted in 2006 that prices would double.

Thai export prices are a benchmark for the industry. The price of the 100 percent grade-B variety, which is set weekly, was at $519 per ton on June 29, and has risen as much as 7.3 percent since outgoing Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva called the election. Abhisit's Democrat Party won 160 seats in the 500- member parliament while Pheu Thai took 264, with 98 percent of the vote counted.

Hey, remember this?  Well Thailand's rice crop just got wiped out, due to floods.

Expect another massive price rise.

I will refrain ... must ... not ... aaaaaa

Quote from: Cain on November 03, 2011, 03:20:44 PM
Expect another massive price rice.

I'm sorry it's an obsessive compulsive thing :sad:

Quote from: Cain on November 03, 2011, 03:20:44 PM

Quote from: Cain on July 15, 2011, 06:58:14 PM
Invest in rice, or, most shameless act of vote-buying in history.  You decide.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-07-04/rice-may-rally-56-as-pro-thaksin-party-sweeps-to-power-in-thai-elections.html

QuoteRice prices in Thailand, the biggest exporter, may rally 56 percent by yearend as the party that won parliamentary elections implements a policy to buy the crop from farmers above current rates, according to a survey.

The export price may climb to $810 per metric ton by Dec. 31, according to a median forecast of six millers, exporters and traders today and yesterday, who commented after Pheu Thai won a majority in yesterday's contest. "We are ready to implement all policies we have announced," Yingluck Shinawatra, who will become Thailand's first female prime minister, said yesterday.

Costlier rice from Thailand, which accounts for about 30 percent of worldwide shipments, may increase global food costs while making supplies from rival Vietnam more competitive. A Bloomberg survey last month, conducted during the campaign, suggested a gain to $750 per ton if Pheu Thai were to win.

"It isn't only Thai prices that will go up, the rest of the world will have to follow," Mamadou Ciss, chief executive officer of Hermes Investments Pte, said from Geneva. The price may jump $100 within two months and peak at $700, said Ciss, who correctly predicted in 2006 that prices would double.

Thai export prices are a benchmark for the industry. The price of the 100 percent grade-B variety, which is set weekly, was at $519 per ton on June 29, and has risen as much as 7.3 percent since outgoing Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva called the election. Abhisit's Democrat Party won 160 seats in the 500- member parliament while Pheu Thai took 264, with 98 percent of the vote counted.

Hey, remember this?  Well Thailand's rice crop just got wiped out, due to floods.

Expect another massive price rise.

Oh fuck!

http://enikrising.blogspot.com/2012/04/imagine-no-campaign-donations-its-easy.html

QuoteImagine, for a moment, that you didn't need to raise money to run for office, that the government would pay you to run. Who would that help? Would it encourage more moderate candidates, who are usually pressured out of nomination contests by party money because they don't stand for anything? Or would it enable the extremists, whom are normally de-funded due to concerns about their toxic views?

QuoteThese findings suggest that it's the more ideologically extreme candidates who take advantage of clean funding to run for office. Under the traditional funding system, party donors function as gate-keepers, reducing the power of extreme candidates by channelling money away from them. Take away the gate-keepers, and it's the extremists who break through, contributing to the polarization of the legislature.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1540-5907.2011.00577.x/abstract

QuoteThis study argues that President Obama's strong association with an issue like health care should polarize public opinion by racial attitudes and race. Consistent with that hypothesis, racial attitudes had a significantly larger impact on health care opinions in fall 2009 than they had in cross-sectional surveys from the past two decades and in panel data collected before Obama became the face of the policy. Moreover, the experiments embedded in one of those reinterview surveys found health care policies were significantly more racialized when attributed to President Obama than they were when these same proposals were framed as President Clinton's 1993 reform efforts. Dozens of media polls from 1993 to 1994 and from 2009 to 2010 are also pooled together to show that with African Americans overwhelmingly supportive of Obama's legislative proposals, the racial divide in health care opinions was 20 percentage points greater in 2009–10 than it was over President Clinton's plan back in 1993–94.

http://www.hks.harvard.edu/fs/dyanagi/Research/TeaParty_Protests.pdf

QuoteCan protests cause political change, or are they merely symptoms of underlying shifts in policy preferences? This paper studies the effect of the Tea Party movement in the United States, which rose to prominence through a series of rallies across the country on April 15, Tax Day, 2009. To identify the causal effect of protests, we use an instrumental variables approach that exploits variation in rainfall on the day of the coordinated rallies. Weather on Tax Day robustly predicts rally attendance and the subsequent local strength of the movement as measured by donations, media coverage, social networking activity, and later events. We show that larger rallies cause an increase in turnout in favor of the Republicans in the 2010 Congressional elections, and increase the likelihood that incumbent Democratic representatives retire. Incumbent policymaking is affected as well: representatives respond to large protests in their district by voting more conservatively in Congress. Finally, the estimates imply significant multiplier effects: for every protester, Republican votes increase by seven to fourteen votes. Together our results show that protests can build political movements that ultimately affect policy, and they suggest that it is unlikely that these effects arise solely through the standard channel of private-information revelation.

http://www.kndu.ac.kr/rinsa/index.jsp?mid1=00000135&mid2=00000684&mid3=&contents_seq=26353&b_mode=R

QuoteKim Jong Il's death is more than just the passing of a chief executive; given North Korea's (NK) hyperpersonalization, it is transformational. As such, Kim Jong Un's ascent offers a unique opportunity to try engagement once again with NK. It may fail, as it has so often before, but the very fluid new circumstances make it worth a major effort. NK is such a dangerous country and the cold war standoff with SK so severe now, that to pass up this rare window would be a tremendous missed opportunity.

More whenever I feel like updating the thread.

Then protesting actually works? So is Occupy going to do any good, or did the baggers only have an effect because the GOP engineered them in the first place?

Posting so I can re-read this thread while sober.

23 MIN till Mon + 1hr 4 B to Catch

Quote from: Anna Mae Bollocks on April 09, 2012, 04:19:13 AM
Then protesting actually works? So is Occupy going to do any good, or did the baggers only have an effect because the GOP engineered them in the first place?

It may be the case that because Tea Party trends already existed in the GOP, politicians there were better positioned to take advantage of the trends.  Furthermore, the Tea Party in many cases had specific policy recommendations to make - sure, they were bad policies, but they were something a politician could promise, and then voters could assess their plausibility and commitment to such ideas.  Occupy says "this is fucked up", but doesn't necessarily say how to respond.  Furthermore, its trends are far less prevalent within the Democratic Party, and so it is probably a lot harder for them to take advantage of, despite attempts to do so.

The Tea Party largely coalesced and received a lot of energy from two things.  The Health Care Law, and a new Black President.  In the case of the former, I think with the economic unease, you had enough independents and moderates who were feeling a bit leery about what Obama was proposing with Health Care that Tea Party stuff took hold.  Now, when it came to the nuttier elements of the TP, namely those focused on the new Black President bit, I would like to think most of those same independents and moderates were all set with that. 

So basically, while the TP were wrong about a great many things, they just happened to be asking some of the same questions, and had some of the same concerns, that a lot of other "normal" Americans had. 

I don't think Occupy has had that same fortune.  Nevermind that they also can't galvanize around one central opponent like the TP could.  That factor can't be discounted. 

I Would rather doubt
in a Long HaiL, that Tp'$ have it wrong
For Future Reference, For the Fun of it
What happens NEXT, come the Last day of the
current Year. & if U think U know
what happens THEN,,,
then,, by all means,
let me know
TOO  t=6:20AMpdT

Quote from: Cain on April 09, 2012, 10:06:14 AM

Quote from: Anna Mae Bollocks on April 09, 2012, 04:19:13 AM
Then protesting actually works? So is Occupy going to do any good, or did the baggers only have an effect because the GOP engineered them in the first place?

It may be the case that because Tea Party trends already existed in the GOP, politicians there were better positioned to take advantage of the trends.  Furthermore, the Tea Party in many cases had specific policy recommendations to make - sure, they were bad policies, but they were something a politician could promise, and then voters could assess their plausibility and commitment to such ideas.  Occupy says "this is fucked up", but doesn't necessarily say how to respond.  Furthermore, its trends are far less prevalent within the Democratic Party, and so it is probably a lot harder for them to take advantage of, despite attempts to do so.

True. I haven't heard anything except "this is fucked up" since they were kicking this around http://occupywallst.org/forum/proposed-list-of-demands-for-occupy-wall-st-moveme/

Quote from: What's-His-Name? on April 09, 2012, 01:03:54 PM
The Tea Party largely coalesced and received a lot of energy from two things.  The Health Care Law, and a new Black President.  In the case of the former, I think with the economic unease, you had enough independents and moderates who were feeling a bit leery about what Obama was proposing with Health Care that Tea Party stuff took hold.  Now, when it came to the nuttier elements of the TP, namely those focused on the new Black President bit, I would like to think most of those same independents and moderates were all set with that. 

So basically, while the TP were wrong about a great many things, they just happened to be asking some of the same questions, and had some of the same concerns, that a lot of other "normal" Americans had. 

I don't think Occupy has had that same fortune.  Nevermind that they also can't galvanize around one central opponent like the TP could.  That factor can't be discounted.

The Tea Party largely coalesced and received a lot of energy money from two things. The Koch brothers.

The Billionaires Bankrolling the Tea Party (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/opinion/29rich.html)

They were a coherent movement as long as the money lasted....

Well, yeah, I'm pretty aware of the bankroll behind the Tea Party organizations.  But it makes it that much easier if The People are buying into the message and spreading it to their neighbors, which was my point.  I mean, even if George Soros backed up a truck full of money at some Occupy headquarters, they still wouldn't end up having the impact on policy that the Tea Party and its followers had. 

Quote from: What's-His-Name? on April 09, 2012, 07:24:41 PM
Well, yeah, I'm pretty aware of the bankroll behind the Tea Party organizations.  But it makes it that much easier if The People are buying into the message and spreading it to their neighbors, which was my point.  I mean, even if George Soros backed up a truck full of money at some Occupy headquarters, they still wouldn't end up having the impact on policy that the Tea Party and its followers had.

Thing is, most of the teabagger apparatus was in place before there was a tea party.

It was astro-turfed, it wasn't some grassroots thing that the Koch brothers saw and decided to fund after the fact.

But if someone just started dumping cash into Occupy right now would it have the same impact?

I say no because while there certainly was a machine behind it, the Tea Party also had a big singular issue and a The Big Smiler behind the big singular issue to drive the fucker.  Occupy doesn't have that.  They don't have a singular enemy.  They have, what, big greedy fat cats?  Big, greedy fat cats have been around forever, that shit has never got people off the couch.

But buy golly a Black President wants to come and give you some Socialist HealthCare.  Fuck, pack up the guns and go tell those Senators what's what.  And it fucking worked.  We got watered down health care because of it.  Watered-down health care that is probably about to be yanked by SCOTUS.  They fucking won.  The won using bad information, scare tactics, and a bunch of other bullshit, but they won. 

Not even in Occupy's wet dreams does that happen. 

Quote from: What's-His-Name? on April 09, 2012, 09:25:07 PM
But if someone just started dumping cash into Occupy right now would it have the same impact?

I say no because while there certainly was a machine behind it, the Tea Party also had a big singular issue and a The Big Smiler behind the big singular issue to drive the fucker.  Occupy doesn't have that.  They don't have a singular enemy.  They have, what, big greedy fat cats?  Big, greedy fat cats have been around forever, that shit has never got people off the couch.

But buy golly a Black President wants to come and give you some Socialist HealthCare.  Fuck, pack up the guns and go tell those Senators what's what.  And it fucking worked.  We got watered down health care because of it.  Watered-down health care that is probably about to be yanked by SCOTUS.  They fucking won.  The won using bad information, scare tactics, and a bunch of other bullshit, but they won. 

Not even in Occupy's wet dreams does that happen.

Reason being wasn't the target, it was how they did things.  Goofy ass "general assemblies" that turned into fucking circuses, and drove off half the protestors, occupying 24/7 (ensuring that it turned into just a hooverville), etc.

I think the OWS movement had a pretty clear list of requests. The difference here is that while neocons are already happy to oblige in digging in their heels and creating stubborn resistance to anything the liberals attempt to do while simultanously obfuscating the issue enough to do nothing, Democrats are simply NOT willing to forsake their corporate cronies to appease THEIR constituents.

Moral of the story: your team will get everything it wants as long as its agenda is to take shit away from YOU and give it to the CORPORATION.

The OWSers weren't ineffective, they were ignored. In so many ways, that's far worse than the neocons re-directing and exploiting an already willing collective.

Uh, protests that are ignored are pretty ineffective.  I mean, isn't that kind of the point of protests, to NOT be ignored? 

Yeah, a big part of the reason OWS was ignored was OWS's own tactics. But I think one of the points to be made here is that the Tea Party would have suffered a similar fate if they had been a pre-existing willing collective. That's an inaccurate characterization of the Tea Party, though. The whole thing was a pre-planned invention funded and backed from the very start by some VERY powerful interests.

Quote from: navkat on April 10, 2012, 12:58:20 PM
The OWSers weren't ineffective, they were ignored.

That's the same as being ineffective.

Quote from: Fuck You One-Eye on April 10, 2012, 06:03:54 PM
Yeah, a big part of the reason OWS was ignored was OWS's own tactics. But I think one of the points to be made here is that the Tea Party would have suffered a similar fate if they had been a pre-existing willing collective. That's an inaccurate characterization of the Tea Party, though. The whole thing was a pre-planned invention funded and backed from the very start by some VERY powerful interests.

DING.

Bernard Finel has a more IR-theory than normal piece up about why offshore-balancing makes him uncomfortable:

http://www.bernardfinel.com/?p=2020&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-dark-reality-of-off-shore-balancing

QuoteThe problem is that the offshore balancers tend to focus on the "offshore" part. That is the popular part, of course. It looks cheaper. It promises to avoid future Iraqs and Afghanistans. It suggests an tough-minded approach to the problem of free-riding. But what it does not do is acknowledge the implication of a strategy posited on the importance of "balancing."

In an off-shore balancing world, a nation secures its interests not by contributing to the provision of public goods, but rather by ensuring that no rival becomes dominant in its sphere. It is a designed to prevent the emergences of threats, by ensuring that those threats are locally-focused and locally balanced.

Think about China. How does an off-shore balancer plan to deal with China. Well, an off-shore balancer sees rising Chinese power as a potential threat, but believes that this threat will most immediately be felt by its neighbors. As long as the United States does not take the primary role in containing China, it is assumed that this role will be taken up by its threatened neighbors, either individually or collectively. So, the off-shore balancers believe that if we limit our role in Asia, for example, some combination of India, Japan, Korea, and ASEAN will emerge to check Chinese power. Our role then becomes to ensure that neither side becomes dominant, and to intercede if major imbalances to occur.

Now, most critics of off-shore balance focus on the issue of whether local actors will respond as assumed. They fear this will not occur, and that rather without the United States in the forefront, those local actors will allow themselves to be, essentially, Finlandized. Or, if not that, that at the very least coordination problems will hamper balancing. I disagree with this criticism. I accept the off-shore balancers' assumptions about state behavior. States will seek to balance rivals in the absense of an outside security guarantor.

The question we really need to pose is whether that is the kind of world we want to live in? Do we want to live in a world that is riven by a large number conflicts as states maneuver to balance each other internally (i.e. arms racing) and externally (i.e. alliances)? The problem with the off-shore balancer position is that it is a strategy for exploiting global disorder rather than promoting global order.

I'm generally in favour of offshore balancing as an overall strategic pose, but Finel brings up some very good criticisms here, especially about how the balancing aspect is so firmly situated in Realist "thinking" (and I use that term very loosely) on anarchy that it could have unintended consequences, given that Realists have been utterly wrong about the direction of the post-Cold War world.  The thing is, this argument may be rendered moot in the long term anyway, as financial constraints mean that offshore balancing is the only option left open to the USA, and American allies start re-arming and rebuilding their own military forces as American military spending decreases.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-04-10/milton-friedman-proved-wrong-by-aluminum-market.html

QuoteThe question is whether expanded financial interest in aluminum has driven up the level and volatility of prices. The dominant academic perspective suggests that market prices will be determined by physical supply and demand, and that financial trading can, if anything, only drive them more rapidly toward balance.

The first prong of this argument applies to speculation in general. As Milton Friedman wrote in 1953 regarding the exchange-rate market, "People who argue that speculation is generally destabilizing seldom realize that this is largely equivalent to saying that speculators lose money, since speculation can be destabilizing in general only if speculators on the average sell when the currency is low in price and buy when it is high." In other words, trading should drive market prices toward equilibrium because successful traders -- the only ones who will survive -- must "buck the trend" by buying cheap while selling dear.

In the aluminum market, however, a number of the conditions necessary for the Friedman principle to hold appear to be absent.

J. Bradford DeLong, a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, and colleagues have shown, for example, that if other market participants tend to follow "positive feedback" strategies by buying when prices rise and selling when prices fall, financial speculators may destabilize prices even as they turn a good profit.

Daniel P. Ahn, a colleague of mine at Citigroup Inc., says that may be precisely what happens when index funds buy aluminum. Even though the funds typically have no information that is unknown to traders, the anonymity of their trades causes the market to misinterpret an index purchase as coming from someone with superior information. Furthermore, index positions are large and most often long. The result is that the initial investment, which causes the price to rise, generates further increases as other traders jump on the bandwagon.

Of course, I am sure you are all aware that for a while I have suspected the role of speculation in driving up food prices around the globe.

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/11/romneys-empathy-gap/

QuoteIn reality, Republicans win all the time without closing the empathy gap. This is because Democratic candidates are generally perceived as more empathetic — more likely to "care about people like me" — than Republican candidates, regardless of who wins. Ronald Reagan in 1984, George H. W. Bush in 1988 and George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004 were all perceived as less empathetic than their Democratic opponents. Danny Hayes, a political scientist, has shown that political parties come to "own" certain traits just like they "own" certain issues, and empathy is a "Democratic" trait. (By contrast, Republicans own "leadership," at least in recent presidential races.) To be sure, Mr. Hayes shows that candidates benefit when voters come to view them favorably on trait dimensions that their party does not own. This might give Mr. Romney an incentive to feel some voters' pain. Indeed, in February, Rick Santorum was, counter to stereotype, perceived as no less empathetic than Mr. Obama, so perhaps Mr. Romney could shift perceptions in his favor. But history shows that perceived empathy is no requirement for victory.

In short, it doesn't matter that Romney doesn't care about all those poor people, despite the constant whittering of Democratic blogs (where this point is almost as common as spelling Romney as Rmoney) aside.

http://newpacificinstitute.org/jsw/?p=10071

QuotePublished in 1983, Strategic Atlas was one of several atlases published during the 1980s that blended world maps with political, economic and military figures and trends. It was the kind of well done set of infographics that really isn't done anymore, particularly now that nobody wants to pay for content. I'll be featuring maps from it now and then, as they relate to Japan and the rest of Asia, both here and at Asian Security Watch.

I picked up a used copy last year, having gotten rid of my original more than a decade ago. Published during the Cold War, the book is rather dated in several areas, particularly the strategic importance of Asia relative to Europe. To be fair, twenty five years ago Europe was where it was at; even I concentrated in German history in college. I can't imagine doing that now.

Here's one map from back when Japan was considered an economic superpower, on the cusp of becoming a military and political superpower. We all know how that turned out. But this map in particular is interesting.

Several observations follow, most notably that Japan is safe from having its trade routes disrupted, so long as it maintains its alliance with the USA and that, unlike Europe, it is not clear that Japan has benefitted from the end of the Cold War.

http://the-diplomat.com/china-power/2012/04/13/behind-china%E2%80%99s-big-slowdown/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+the-diplomat+%28The+Diplomat+RSS%29

QuoteOver the past 6 months, housing prices have been falling, construction projects slowing, and the real estate market has been tapering off, primarily due to central government policies aimed at cooling the radioactive housing market. But it's not just the real estate sector that's seeing the effects of these policies – there are many other sectors and industries affected.

As the Wall Street Journal notes, residential real estate accounts for nearly 25 percent of such industries as "construction materials and appliances." Indeed, raw materials are highly vulnerable to construction downturns. Some analysts have gone so far as to call this slowdown the beginning of the end for the commodities boom.

The author notes, correctly, that an end to the boom of house-building would have severe social and economic impacts on China.

http://duckofminerva.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/constructivism-that-wasnt.html

QuoteFor this year's ISA conference I was supposed to write a paper called "The Constructivism That Wasn't: On the Non-Inevitability of Sociological Liberalism." The idea was that I would go back and carefully reconstruct those moments of historical contingency in which an alternative IR constructivism -- one which did not so neatly track with sociological liberalism, roughly defined as the notion that individuals' thoughts and beliefs shape their behavior an thus the social world that they inhabit -- might have emerged. The alternative history is simple: accentuate Morgenthau's debt to Nietzsche and Weber and play up his sense of the tragic, reclaim Waltz as an analytical systems theorist instead of the prophet of the inevitable consequences of systemic anarchy for state behavior, push Jervis' work on the manipulation of images and symbols into a more semiotic direction by rooting things in social/discursive instead of cognitive psychology, and then place Nick Onuf's 1989 book (about to be released in a new edition, so people can actually read and assign it!) at the center of an alternate way of worlding, and knowledge-producing, in the field as a whole. Presto, a constructivism that would be just as anti-utopian as the field's founders would have liked: rules, Onuf reminds us, produce rule, and domination (whether legitimate in the Weberian sense, or just naked force) is an omnipresent factor in political life. And then you can fill in the blanks for yourself: insert a whole variety of social and political theorists at appropriate points in the lineage, produce a mashed-up remix of The Culture of National Security and Cultures of Insecurity, and so on.

But as we all know, this didn't happen, and constructivism came to mean "ideational variables matter," where matter = systematic cross-case co-variation, best captured in statistical studies whether large-n "quantitative" or small-n "qualitative" -- and that's not a methodological distinction, that's a lifestyle choice. All of this to the point where I usually don't feel comfortable self-identifying as a "constructivist" without a great deal of qualification. So the more I have thought about it, the more I have become less and convinced that this really could have happened differently in mainstream Anglophone IR, because mainstream Anglophone IR is dominated by US IR, which is constituted as a subfield of US Political Science -- and both US Political Science and US IR bear the traces of the way in which they were legitimated and justified within the US social and political context. In global IR, there may be space for a plurality of voices and visions, and a robust debate about important theoretical and methodological issues like the nature of scientific explanation, the fundamental structure of the world system, and the legacies of imperialism and colonialism (particularly the issue of whether what we have nowadays is any significantly different than what we had during the period of formal colonial empires). But in US IR, as a subfield of US Political Science, the organization of intellectual life forces virtually every interesting question into the liberal cookie-cutter with its twin blades of neopositivism and actor-centric reductionism, and thus neuters anything like a radical critique or even the envisioning of a significantly different alternative future by assuming virtually all of the interesting things away at the outset. If there is actual contingency here, it is the contingency of IR as a separate field of study having been nurtured in the United States.

This is a bit theoretical even for me, but some high-level stuff might be just what the doctor ordered.

http://duckofminerva.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/popular-culture-and-civil-military.html

QuoteSome of those who missed the ISA panel on popular culture have asked me if I can send them my remarks. So I decided to upload them in video format as well. You can see my presentation on Battlestar Galactica and civil-military relations below. This is essentially a presentation of a research paper I did with two students, which will be published later this year in Nicholas Kiersey and Iver Neumann's Battlestar Galactica and International Relations.

Something a little bit more pop culture, for you.

No comment

http://www.socialsciences.manchester.ac.uk/disciplines/politics/about/themes/mancept/workingpapers/documents/AdrianBlauAnti-StraussforthcomingTheJournalofPolitics2012.pdf

QuoteWhy does Hobbes write no book on music? It would be scandalous to say that this was an oversight. But what shall we make of Hobbes's silence about music? An author may reveal his intentions by the title of his books. Two of Hobbes‟s books, and only two, have titles consisting of one word only: Leviathan and Behemoth. The number of books in the Leviathan is five, if we include the "Review and Conclusion"; the number of books in Behemoth is four. Five letters in the word "Leviathan", and four in "Behemoth",combine to produce the word "Beethoven." It is of the essence of devices of this kind that they are merely hints. But one is compelled to look for other hints that Hobbes was writing about Beethoven. Hobbes's manifest blunders reveal his homage to Beethoven. Hobbes writes that Aristotle's Politics depicts ants and bees as political animals (De Cive 5.5, 71). But Aristotle does not mention ants (Politics 1253a). It would be an injustice to deny that Hobbes has a perfect memory. It is a rule of common prudence to ask what Hobbes intended by this error. Later in the same paragraph, Hobbes uses a sentence with the words 'trumpet' and 'thunder and lightning'. We do not think it is coincidence that in the only sentence in the Leviathan where 'trumpet' occurs, Hobbes again mentions thunder and lightning (Leviathan 40, 324). Yet the intelligent reader will see that the context of these words is entirely different in the two books. Why then does Hobbes identify trumpets with thunder and lightning?

http://themonkeycage.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Leimgruber-et-al.-2010.pdf

QuoteLittle is known about the ideological relationship between the Swiss political elite and the general public. Based on the SELECTS 2007 candidate and voter surveys, we compare the value orientations of both groups by applying ordinal factor analysis. First, we test whether political leaders or their supporters are more ideologically polarized. Second, we investigate whether ideological congruency between the electorate and representatives varies from party to party. Third, we examine whether winning candidates are ideologically more remote from their party supporters than unsuccessful candidates. We find that ideological polarization is larger within the political elite than within the general public. As a consequence, representatives of parties with rather extreme value orientations represent the moderate electorate rather poorly. Similarly, successful candidates are found to be more distant from their party supporters than unsuccessful candidates. These findings challenge traditional spatial voting theory but accord nicely with the directional model of voting behavior.

Political science is essentially the systemized study of power.  Therefore, in any industry where power relations exist, analogies and concepts from political science can be used to explain the phenomena in question.

Such as rap beefs.

http://lynch.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/08/27/jay_zs_hegemony_in_the_age_of_kanye

QuoteThe structure of the balance of power in the rap world continued to evolve towards multipolarity over the last two years, if not an actual hegemonic transition, in the midst of a serious financial crisis afflicting the entire industry -- a situation not unfamiliar to the White House. The relentless rise of southern rap mirrors the economic and political rise of Asia. What had once been a marginal, derivative, and largely dismissed regional genre has risen to be a legitimate contender for hegemony. Lil Wayne and his Young Money label racked up success after success alongside older southern powers like T.I. and newcomers like B.o.B. The West Coast, like Europe, has declined significantly since its old great power days. Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg still do their thing, but rarely have a major impact anymore (RIP Nate Dogg, by the way); Detox remains an urban legend, and we'll see if Game's new RED album does better. 50 Cent, a great power only a few years ago, has largely collapsed -- Russia, perhaps? Eminem returned strong after a long struggle with depression to make the ferociously brilliant Recovery album; but like, say, India or Brazil he has always been a powerhouse in his own world, neither influencing nor affected by the wider field.

In short, the environment facing Jay-Z over the last two years was turbulent and challenging, and he could not simply assume continued hegemony despite his track record or skills. Rap's center of gravity was being pulled relentlessly away from its New York roots, taking on a more southern and more international feel. The entire industry faced a massive financial crisis, as the internet and market fragmentation continued to contribute to the steady collapse of the business model for albums and record companies. What is more, there was every reason to view Jay-Z himself as a declining power. While a Jay-Z album could still dominate the rap space as completely as the U.S. military could dominate any global battlespace, that dominance rested on deteriorating foundations. Jay-Z should have seen his skills declining at the age of 41 (yeah, he's 10 months younger than me - and for what it's worth I think his rhymes are better than ever). He could hardly avoid being distracted by the competing pulls of running Def Jam or Roc Nation, and the comforts of marriage to the divine Beyoncé.

Wow! :lol:

Quote from: navkat on April 10, 2012, 12:58:20 PMI think the OWS movement had a pretty clear list of requests. The difference here is that while neocons are already happy to oblige in digging in their heels and creating stubborn resistance to anything the liberals attempt to do while simultanously obfuscating the issue enough to do nothing, Democrats are simply NOT willing to forsake their corporate cronies to appease THEIR constituents.

Moral of the story: your team will get everything it wants as long as its agenda is to take shit away from YOU and give it to the CORPORATION.

But the Democrats aren't on OWS's team. I thought they are protesting against both?

It's a two-party con. Another problem of OWS is that they really don't have a "team", in a political "who to vote for" sense.

Doesnt matter to a republican. Theyre all pretty convinced that occupy is a pawn of the democratic party. Not that the dems didnt try and do that but they didnt quite get it.

That wasn't the point I was trying to make, it doesn't matter to a democrat either, since they bought in to the idea that "their" party will fix everything right.

http://pollsandvotes.com/PaV/2012/04/gas-prices-and-partisan-filters/

QuoteRepublicans are largely of the view that presidents can do a lot about gas prices, while Democrats are convinced market prices are beyond the power of presidents to control.

Or so it is in 2012. In May 2006, when the CBS News Poll asked this exact question as gas prices spiked during the Bush administration, the partisans had just the opposite theories of presidential control of the economy.

And both times, the people who believed the President could wave a magic oil price wand were retarded.

It could be argued that, in retrospect, Bush could have done something about oil prices by, I don't know, not invading an oil-producing country, causing an insurgency which was put down in a ham-fisted way, nearly 5 years after the invasion.  That makes a certain amount of sense.

But to otherwise affect oil prices, the only option for a President is to release the strategic reserve.  Which can be a problem, when one is possibly being drawn into a conflict with Iran.

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/23/the-overrated-vice-presidential-home-state-effect/

QuoteIn the chart below, I've run these comparisons for all major-party vice presidential nominees since 1920. We compare the ticket's R.V.I. in the year the vice presidential candidate was on the ticket to the next and previous election cycles in which he was not on the ticket and when there was also no one else from his state running for president or vice president.

For instance, in looking at the R.V.I. for the Democratic nominee for vice president in 1992, Al Gore, the comparison years are 1988 (when Mr. Gore was not on the ticket, and nobody else from Tennessee was) and 2004 (since Mr. Gore was again the vice presidential nominee in 1996 and was the presidential nominee in 2000, disqualifying those years). There are also a few cases in which there were multiple candidates on the ticket in the same state in the same year. Richard Nixon's vice presidential nominee in 1960, for instance, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., was from Massachusetts, the same state as the Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kennedy. We simply throw out these years, since Mr. Lodge's performance might have been more a reflection of Kennedy's strength in Massachusetts than his own strengths and weaknesses.

Over all, the benefit provided by a vice presidential nominee has been quite paltry under this method. On average since 1920, he has produced a net gain of only about two percentage points for the top of the ticket in his home state.

 :fnord:  (http://www.politico.com/blogs/burns-haberman/2012/04/neutralizing-seamus-with-dog-meat-120882.html)

Interesting.  Probably flawed/oversimplified/going to be used by hack partisans

http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/29/finding-the-limits-of-empathy/?

QuoteThe more interested in politics a conservative is, the lower his (or her) level of empathy. Liberals move in the opposite direction: the more interested in politics they are, the more empathetic.

In the 2010 election, 42 percent of voters identified themselves as conservative; 38 percent said they were moderate; and 20 percent said they were liberal. If that division obtains in 2012 and beyond, the proportion of conservative to liberal voters in the electorate should give liberals pause, especially insofar as they expect elected officials to propose and pass legislation the underlying purpose of which is to help those most in need...