Liberty/Security

It's for your own good

2012-01-27T23:26:00.001-05:00

Image by DonkeyHotey via Flickr

Yeah, right.

A recent Freedom of Information Act suit by the Electronic Privacy Information Center reveals some of the fun the Department of Homeland Security has been having in the name of "protecting" us--or whoever they think they're protecting. According to the findings

...the DHS has hired and instructed General Dynamics to monitor political dissent and the dissenters. The range of websites listed as being monitored is quite impressive...
***
Some of the more high profile and highly trafficked sites being monitored include the comments sections of The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, the Huffington Post, the Drudge Report, Wired, and ABC News. In addition, social networking sites Facebook, MySpace and Twitter are being monitored. For the first time, the public not only has an idea who the DHS is pursuing with their surveillance and where, but what they are looking for as well. General Dynamics contract requires them to “[identify] media reports that reflect adversely on the U.S. Government, DHS, or prevent, protect, respond government activities.” The DHS also instructed General Dynamics to generate “reports on DHS, Components, and other Federal Agencies: positive and negative reports on FEMA, CIA, CBP, ICE, etc. as well as organizations outside the DHS.” In other words, the DHS wants to know who you are if you say anything critical about the government.

You better watch out, you better not cry. They know when you've been sleeping, they know when you're awake. They know if you've been "bad" or "good" (by their definition), so be good for goodness sake.

This is what journalism looks like

2012-01-27T22:26:00.000-05:00

You may have missed this. And even if you'd seen it you might not have recognized it. It's called journalism. We used to have it in the United States.

Global Threats

2012-01-27T21:22:00.001-05:00

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The ink is dry on the contract for the new textbook I'm to co-author. It's entitled Global Threats (CQ Press, 2013), and I'm a little anxious about it. Last time I tried to write a textbook it was on Soviet politics--and the Soviet Union collapsed. Trying to keep up with what was happening, while it happening, was impossible. Even if I could have kept up with everything up to the day I handed in my sections, the book would have been overtaken by events long before it was out the door of the publisher. Trying to do the impossible produced a lot of unnecessary anxiety then, and thinking about it still triggers a little anxiety today.

The good news is I know better now than to attempt the impossible. As long as I keep my perfectionist tendencies in line, this new book should not only be possible, but fun. How often do I get (paid) to speculate on as many possibilities as I can think of for the collapse of nations and civilizations? The book encourages brainstorming, and that's one of my favorite activities. It's as if I get to write a bad science fiction novel without the going to the trouble of developing believable characters.

So if I get anxious it's my own fault: I'm the one who can choose to set the bar higher than any real person can achieve, or worry about how my work will be received by others. Instead, I'll do my best to produce good work and have some fun.

A small step in the right direction

2012-01-17T11:28:00.000-05:00

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I have a dream.

I have a dream where Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and George Bush are in cages, tried for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and violations of the Bill of Rights.

I'd prefer to see it in an American court. I'd like to think we can police our own, and only an American court can handle Constitutional violations. But I'd be willing to accept handing them over to the International Criminal Court. Perhaps a combined trial with the remaining leadership of Al Qaeda.

If it's the best we can do, I'd even accept a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, similar to that after Apartheid in South Africa. At least then we could get the truth out, shame those who thought they cold hide their crimes, and build a consensus to never do it again.

Meanwhile, I have to settle for whatever small steps are made. One of these is a recent report by the World Organization for Human Rights and the Washington College of Law at American University. It's entitled INDEFENSIBLE: A Reference for Prosecuting Torture and Other Felonies Committed By U.S. Officials Following September 11th, and it does a solid job of starting to make the case for the prosecution. From the Table of Contents:

II. The Attorney General Has the Authority to Appoint Special Counsel to Investigate and, Where Warranted, Prosecute Crimes Committed by United States Government Officials.... 20
A. Department of Justice Regulations grant the Attorney General authority to appoint Special Counsel............................................................................. 20
B. The Attorney General also has the power to delegate broad authority to a special prosecutor pursuant to the U.S. Code. ........................................... 32
C. Where the subject matter of the investigation could raise serious conflict of interest issues pertaining to the DOJ, the DOJ regulations should be invoked as the appropriate source of authority for appointing Special Counsel ............. 36
III. The Orchestrated Effort by Former Top-Level Administration Officials to Implement a Detainee Interrogation Program Resulted in the Widespread, Systematic, and Unlawful Abuse and Torture of Detainees ......................... 38
A. High-ranking members of the Bush Administration issued policies or directives
authorizing detainee abuse ................................................................ 39
B. Senior-level U.S. government officials set out to create a legal framework that would justify the use of unlawful interrogation tactics against detainees.......... 48
C. The policies and directives issued by top U.S. government officials authorizing specific interrogation tactics were the direct cause of detainee torture, and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment...................................................................82
IV. High-Ranking U.S. Government Officials Violated U.S. Domestic and International Law by Approving or Facilitating the Use of Torture and Other Forms of Human Rights ViolationsAgainst Terror Suspects ........................114
A. Top U.S. officials unlawfully conspired, facilitated, and directed the commission of torture and other human rights violations in violation of international law......................114
B. Top U.S. officials may also be held criminally accountable for contributing to, or conspiring to commit, crimes in violation of other U.S. federal criminal laws ...................... 117
C. Bush Administration officials conspired to violate the Torture Act by agreeing to, forming, and implementing policies and procedures detailing and recommending acts violating the Torture Act ........................................... 140
D. Officials who have either aided, commanded, or counseled for the commission of felonies, or who conspired to do the same, may be prosecuted in U.S. courts under 18 U.S.C. § 2 and 18 U.S.C. § 371 ...................................... 156
E. No legal defense may be raised that would preclude investigation or prosecution of individuals who approved or facilitated the commission of torture ..................................... 228
V. Conclusion....................................................240

Maybe I'll use this for my UN and Law class. Have them try the case?

People's Blog for the Constitution » Report calls for prosecution of top government officials for acts of torture

Paging Jason Bourne

2012-01-13T13:11:00.000-05:00

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Every so often the curtain parts and one sees the world is a lot more like a spy movie than most people want to believe. Memos have leaked from the the CIA describing a "false flag" operation by the Israelis, directed against Iran, in which an anti-Iranian terrorist group was told they were being sponsored by the Americans. In this world, you can never be entirely sure who you are working for, or with. And once discovered (during W's administration), what was the reaction?

The CIA memos of the incident have been "blue bordered," meaning that they were circulated to senior levels of the broader U.S. intelligence community as well as senior State Department officials.
What has become crystal clear, however, is the level of anger among senior intelligence officials about Israel's actions. "This was stupid and dangerous," the intelligence official who first told me about the operation said. "Israel is supposed to be working with us, not against us. If they want to shed blood, it would help a lot if it was their blood and not ours. You know, they're supposed to be a strategic asset. Well guess what? There are a lot of people now, important people, who just don't think that's true."

False Flag - By Mark Perry | Foreign Policy

It's hard to manuafacture a god

2012-01-10T08:51:00.001-05:00

From the looks of things, the attempt to consolidate Kim Jong-un's godhead are not going well with all sectors. Some of them are downright laughable. The ever-fascinating Nightwatch describes what's going on:

North Korea: Sunday, 8 January, was the birthday of Kim Jong-un, but it passed without fanfare. Instead, millions of North Koreans viewed a 50-minute television program showing Kim Jong-un greeting enthusiastic soldiers, driving a military tank, handling weapons, sitting in the cockpit of a military aircraft and riding a horse.

Comment: North Korean propagandists have indulged in the theater of the absurd with the 50 minute documentary on the military genius of a young man raised in a Swiss boarding school who has never worn a uniform, never trained with a weapon and never done a pushup as an adult. In North Korean tanks and personnel carriers and in all North Korean combat aircraft, Kim Jong-un probably would be disqualified as a crew member or pilot because his girth would not allow him to fit, except for a photo op. Armor and flight officers have strict height, weight and girth requirements.

In their zeal to manufacture a leader, the propagandists risk blow back from real soldiers. There were numerous assassination attempts against Kim Chong-il by soldiers because he had no military background, never wore a uniform or submitted to military training. He had a half-brother who did, however, and rose to the rank of colonel, but was exiled to Poland as an ambassador.

Only Kim Il-sung was a genuine, Soviet-trained and advised military leader. Kim Jong-un resembles his grandfather in appearance, but that is where the likeness ends. This leadership transition is not being well-handled, from outside appearances, and cannot be considered stable based on the need to manufacture military credentials for Kim Jong-un.

The need to manufacture military credentials for the successor is the best evidence yet that the military are in control and must be placated. The family leadership group around Kim Jong-un appears to want to restore the party's authority, which Kim Chong-il eviscerated and reviled for most of his tenure. However, in the short term, they cannot. Thus they apparently must pander first to the Korean People's Army. The Army, for now, is dominant in this power struggle, but the tension offers opportunities for South Korea and the US to nurture greater Party control.

Kim Jong-un. Born last Friday in 1984 (photos from a birthday in 2009).

see Nightwatch

Why I am not an Austrian economist

2012-01-06T11:26:00.000-05:00

I do, however, empathize which much of what they do, and why. A lot of social science is model-building and smuggled assumptions. Where I disagree is with their assertion that they are immune from doing the same things. A good case in point can be found in Mark Crovilli's article on "absolute" knowledge and science. If you are interested, follow the discussion in the comments section. We'll see if anyone responds to mine:

Excellent article. One of the great things about a well-reasoned argument is you can identify precisely where you you disagree with it. In this case, everything up to "absolute certainty in science cannot be acquired by means of the "scientific method" and the collection and interpretation of empirical evidence. For beings that lack omniscience, collection and interpretation of empirical evidence can only yield imperfect and subjective beliefs about how the world works" makes perfect sense to me.

However, the statement "absolute certainty in science can only be acquired by discovering propositions about the world that can be known to be true a priori — propositions that cannot possibly be thought to be false" smuggles in an assumption I do not agree with: that there are statements about the real world that can be known a priori. I see no reason to assume such things exist, and every reason in my experience to assume they don't. Cases where things have been suggested as a priori true about the world that exists (as opposed to a world or system set up by a theorist) seem to me to be cases of a failure of imagination. The real world--whatever that is--is not only stranger than we imagine, it's probably stranger than we *can* imagine. All our concepts are imperfect simplifications.

Thus, partial "explanation" is the best we can do. See what works, see what doesn't, revise our models appropriately. If you want "absolute" knowledge from science, you're going to be disappointed.

(in my opinion, of course--that goes with the territory)

I suspect one of two things will happen. Either (a) my point will be completely ignored, or (b) it will trigger rage among the true believers. People love to protect cognitive consistency. I hope I'll learn something interesting. Maybe the students of Mises can teach me more than I've given them credit for.

What Is a Scientific Theory? - Mark R. Crovelli - Mises Daily

Tonight's lesson from the Iowa caucuses

2012-01-03T23:26:00.003-05:00

One empire down, one to go?

2012-01-03T13:02:00.000-05:00

Here's an interesting perspective on where we've been and where we're going, as articulated by Monika Halan:

The fracturing post-World War II equations showed through the plaster in 2011. The 63-year period from 1945 to 2008 will be remembered as the time when two dominant ideas about people and money, and how we choose to organize ourselves around these ideologies, died. One version delinked people from money; the other put money before people. The first collapse was in 1991 when the dominant interpretation of collectivism shattered the Soviet Union into 15 shards. The classless, moneyless, stateless, egalitarian society, which took from each according to his ability and gave to each according to his need, crumbled under the weight of authority and effort that was needed to impose something so state-centric and unnatural in place. Progress does get measured by money, and the severe scarcities and the dysfunctional economies of the Soviet bloc hastened the collapse—the delinking of people and money did not hold true.

But handing over the keys to the market caused another collapse, and 2008 was when the interpretation of individualism in the form of predatory capitalism began its death dirge when the US’ financial sector demonstrated what unregulated greed can do. This version of capitalism (which was not what Adam Smith envisaged) delinked risk from reward, made a section of labour behave like capital, and made governments subordinate to the transnational corporation. That version of capitalism, emboldened by the breakdown of communism, pushed for and got what were called “free” markets and “less” government. But markets, as was later found out, were not really free—but compromised by the 1% who held the levers of control to move the system. And move it they did, towards appropriating more and more for themselves.

But there's more to it than that: both post-war empires overextended themselves. The Soviets couldn't pull back and manage a real "restructuring" (perestroika) and failed to keep "openness" (glasnost') under sufficient control to keep the empire intact. Today, with greater technologies for information transparency--and heavy-handed attempts to restrict it--the parallels for the US are too close for comfort. Do we really think the TSA is just for the external threat?

And then there's the Chinese. The Chinese government is watching the various "Springs" of recent history and finding it's too vulnerable for comfort. Little noticed in the growth of Chinese military power is the fact that the internal security forces now have a budget that rivals that of the PLA.

Old patterns of social organization and control are breaking down, but there's no consensus on what will replace them. Probably the best we can do is encourage experimentation, and see what works (and for whom) in various circumstances. But that's precisely what those in power are most opposed to trying. This could get interesting.

Liberty, Equality, Fraternity - Home - livemint.com

Why I am not a "big-L" libertarian

2012-01-02T04:09:00.000-05:00

The short answer: for the same reason I'm not an anarchist, or a communist, or whatever--I don't trust absolute principles.

The long answer is articulated by nobel-prize winning economist Ronald Coase in a classic interview:

Reason: Though you are now known as a leading free market economist, you started your intellectual career as a socialist. Why and when did your political views change?

Coase: They changed gradually. What was most important was the work I did on the economics of public utilities at the London School of Economics. I studied the results of municipal operation of utilities and the effects of nationalization, particularly in the post office. This led to grave doubts about nationalization. It didn't produce the results people said it did. My views have always been driven by factual investigations. I've never started off--this is perhaps why I'm not a libertarian--with the idea that a human being has certain rights. I ask, "What are the rights which produce certain results?" I'm thinking in terms of production, the lives of people, standard of living, and so on. It has always been a factual business with me. I discovered that municipal operation didn't work as well as people said it would, and nationalization did not either.

Reason: You said you're not a libertarian. What do you consider your politics to be?

Coase: I really don't know. I don't reject any policy without considering what its results are. If someone says there's going to be regulation, I don't say that regulation will be bad. Let's see. What we discover is that most regulation does produce, or has produced in recent times, a worse result. But I wouldn't like to say that all regulation would have this effect because one can think of circumstances in which it doesn't.

Reason: Can you give us an example of what you consider to be a good regulation and then an example of what you consider to be a not-so-good regulation?

Coase: This is a very interesting question because one can't give an answer to it. When I was editor ofThe Journal of Law and Economics, we published a whole series of studies of regulation and its effects. Almost all the studies--perhaps all the studies--suggested that the results of regulation had been bad, that the prices were higher, that the product was worse adapted to the needs of consumers, than it otherwise would have been. I was not willing to accept the view that all regulation was bound to produce these results. Therefore, what was my explanation for the results we had? I argued that the most probable explanation was that the government now operates on such a massive scale that it had reached the stage of what economists call negative marginal returns. Anything additional it does, it messes up. But that doesn't mean that if we reduce the size of government considerably, we wouldn't find then that there were some activities it did well. Until we reduce the size of government, we won't know what they are.

(Thanks to Virginia Postrel for reminding me of this interview.)

It's about estimating and observing consequences, within the context of an ethical framework. What is the right end to achieve, and how do you avoid a means whose anticipated and unanticipated consequences are worse than the original problem you want to solve? Today, in an era of "negative marginal returns," large-scale government action often (usually) makes things worse. But not always.

Thus, when I hear Ron Paul talk about reducing America's military presence around the world, I think he's on the right track. I'm willing to be persuaded otherwise, but the knee-jerk interventionism of the past sixty or so years doesn't seem to be supported by the evidence. When he talks about ending trade treaties, I want to learn what he'll replace them with. The world is too interdependent for economic artarky. International law and organizations have emerged, piecemeal for the most part, because they meet a need. When he talks about removing all social safety nets, even for catastrophic and random events, he sounds wrong both morally and economically.

The big-L Libertarian Party bills itself as the "party of principle," and I admire that. I also fear it. The Bolsheviks were a "party of principle," too. When political principles become so absolute that they get in the way of observing and thinking and adapting to change, it's time to rethink the principles.

Leaders and the "common good"

2012-01-01T19:15:00.001-05:00

On day one I give my foreign policy class three "laws" that explain ninety percent of what states do:

What people *believe* is real determines what they will attempt.
What *is* real determines what will work.
Leaders will do whatever is in their power to stay in power.

There are other factors, but these are the big ones. It's odd how the hardest one to get people to believe is rule #3. Now the Economist publishes an interview with Alastair Smith (New York University) in which he gives some great examples of what I've been talking about all these years. For example,

It is virtually impossible to find any example where leaders are not acting in their own self interest. If you are a democrat you want to gerrymander districts and have an electoral college. This vastly reduces the number of votes a president needs to win an election. Then tax very highly. It’s much better to decide who gets to eat than to let the people feed themselves. If you lower taxes people will do more work, but then people will get rewards that aren’t coming through you. Everything good must come through you. Look at African farm subsidies. The government buys crops at below market price by force. This is a tax on farmers who then can’t make a profit. So, how do you reward people? The government subsidises fertilisers and hands it back that way. In Tanzania vouchers for fertilisers are handed out not to the most productive areas but to the party loyalist areas. This is always subject to the constraint that if you tax too highly people won’t work. This is the big debate in the US. The Republicans are saying that the Democrats have too many taxes and want to suppress workers. But when they were in power five years ago they had no problem with taxing and spending policies, but now it’s taxing their supporters to reward Democrats.

Or, as Harry Browne is supposed to have observed, the state breaks your legs, gives you crutches, and claims credit for the fact you can still get around.

And what about the common good? I don't deny there might be one, but I'd never count on it being the basis of policy. As Smith observes, "If you’re working for the common good you didn’t come to power in the first place. If you’re not willing to cheat, steal, murder and bribe then you don’t come to power. "

What if WWIII had hapened?

2011-12-31T09:53:00.000-05:00

I wrote my dissertation on nuclear war planning. This stuff has always held a fascination for me. With the passage of time, we now know more about what kind of world the leaders expected they would see when it all went down.

The British have released the 1962 Cabinet Office War Book, including the password to activate the secret bunker that would hold the key 230 politicians and bureaucrats responsible for picking up the pieces.

The code word, by the way, was "orangeade." Just in case you ever need to know.

Meanwhile, courtesy of FEMA, the NRDC, and War News Updates we have this estimate of the targets to be struck in the US in the event of nuclear war.

Thank God that didn't happen. Pray it never will.

An adult at the table

2011-12-31T09:11:00.001-05:00

There remains hope that the people who actually have an understanding of the situation will restrain the politicians. It's hard to dismiss the current and past heads of the Mossad as "anti-Israel" or "soft on defense."

A nuclear-armed Iran wouldn't necessarily constitute a threat to Israel's continued existence, Mossad chief Tamir Pardo reportedly hinted earlier this week.
***
On Tuesday evening, Pardo addressed an audience of about 100 Israeli ambassadors. According to three ambassadors present at the briefing, the intelligence chief said that Israel was using various means to foil Iran's nuclear program and would continue to do so, but if Iran actually obtained nuclear weapons, it would not mean the destruction of the State of Israel.

The ambassadors said Pardo did not comment on the possibility of an Israeli military assault on Iran."What is the significance of the term existential threat?" the ambassadors quoted Pardo as asking. "Does Iran pose a threat to Israel? Absolutely. But if one said a nuclear bomb in Iranian hands was an existential threat, that would mean that we would have to close up shop and go home. That's not the situation. The term existential threat is used too freely."

"But what was clearly implied by his remarks is that he doesn't think a nuclear Iran is an existential threat to Israel," one of the envoys said.

For the past several years, Netanyahu has characterized a nuclear Iran as an existential threat to Israel. The prime minister has even compared Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Adolf Hitler and argued that Iran should be treated as Nazi Germany should have been dealt with in 1938, just before World War II. In contrast, Barak said in April 2010 that Iran "was not an existential threat at the moment," but warned that it could become one in the future.Pardo's remarks follow lively a public debate in recent months over a possible Israeli attack on Iran's nuclear facilities. One of the figures at the center of this public debate has been Pardo's predecessor as Mossad chief, Meir Dagan. Dagan has argued that Israel should only resort to military force "when the knife is at its throat and begins to cut into the flesh." He has also criticized Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak, accusing them of pushing for an Israeli attack on Iran, and warned that such an assault would have disastrous consequences.

In the cabinet, Netanyahu and Barak have been the leading proponents of a preemptive strike on Iran's nuclear facilities. So far, however, they have not managed to convince a majority of either the "octet" forum of eight senior ministers or the diplomatic-security cabinet to support their position.

Otto von Bismarck, master of Realpolitik, probably said it best: "Preemptive war is like committing suicide for fear of death."

How bad is it?

2011-12-30T22:10:00.000-05:00

Porter Stansbury, already noted for his gloomy predictions about the American economy, finds "the numbers tell us America is in decline... if not outright collapse." His analysis starts with an estimate of real per capita GDP/time, based on a market-basket of currencies and/or gold. Even this has pitfalls. But, anyway, he uses a commodity index (the CRB) until 1975, and after the US is off the gold standard he switches to gold, and the chart looks like this:

I don't know that this is the best way to estimate what is going on, but clearly something is. And this misses what may be the greatest problem of all: that per capita GDP tells us nothing about the distribution of wealth. Things got better, it seems, in the years from Reagan to George W. Bush--but how much of that was consolidated in the hands of a few? Even ignoring that, however, after 2001 things look bad for almost everyone.

Why bring this up here? Because economic failure promotes desperation, and crime, and a police state mentality.

Stansbury connects the decline to an ethic of entitlement, coupled with vast (and unpunished) corruption at the top. Henry Paulson and Tim Geitner should be behind bars for lying to Congress and providing more accurate insider information to old associates. Congress doesn't do anything about it (perhaps because the Congress as a whole has an ever-widening gap with their consitutents, based in part on their exemption from insider-trading laws).

He also wants to claim that there's a direct correspondence to the Great Society programs, either by design (to buy off troublesome groups) or error (the basic errors of large-scale government planning systems). That's debateable, but what isn't in doubt are the numbers--and the spiral of poverty and crime and incarceration they represent. Some data points, again from Stansbury:

According to the NAACP, Texas taxpayers spent $175 million in 2009 to imprison residents from a small part of Houston – only 10 zip codes out of 75. Thus, people from neighborhoods that are home to only about 10% of the city's population account for more than 33% of the state's entire $500 million annual prison spending. These neighborhoods are overwhelmingly poor and African American.

In Pennsylvania, taxpayers will spend $290 million in 2009 to imprison residents from just 11 of Philadelphia's neighborhoods, representing about 25% of the city population. On this relatively small urban area, the state will spend roughly half its $500 million prison budget. These neighborhoods are overwhelmingly poor and African American.

In New York, taxpayers will spend $539 million to imprison residents from only 24 of New York City's 200 different neighborhoods. Only 16% of the city's population lives in these areas, but they will account for nearly half of the state's $1.1 billion prison budget. These neighborhoods are overwhelmingly poor and African American.

This is not about race, or at least not only about race. In Detroit, where twenty-seven percent of African-American males graduate from high school, only nineteen percent of white males do so. In practical terms, in an economy that's increasingly technical and global, these people have little or no chance.

My dad used to be a principal in the schools of St. Louis. Eventually, he ended up in charge of the school for incarcerated minors. I'm not sure what's worse: that he found that to be one of his safer assignments, or the fact that some of his students would commit crimes to get off the streets and return to the relative safely of his school.

Today, this country has more than seven million people in prison or on parole, more that any other industrialized state. The prison population has grown from less than half a million people to more than 2.5 million today--and the building and running of prisons has become a profitable growth industry. What does that say about us?

Stansbury identifies villians: democrats, republicans, government employee unions, big business. I don't agree with all of his analysis. But it's worth a look at the start of what is likely to be a very, very difficult year.

A good idea: recall the bastards

2011-12-30T21:49:00.004-05:00

Moving quickly on Christmas Day after the US Senate voted 86 - 14 to pass the National Defense Authorization Act of 2011 (NDAA) which allows for the indefinite military detention of American citizens without charge or trial, Montanans have announced the launch of recall campaigns against Senators Max Baucus and Jonathan Tester, who voted for the bill.
Montana is one of nine states with provisions that say that the right of recall extends to recalling members of its federal congressional delegation, pursuant to Montana Code 2-16-603, on the grounds of physical or mental lack of fitness, incompetence, violation of oath of office, official misconduct, or conviction of certain felony offenses.

Comment: We can hope. Can something similar be arranged in Pennsylvania? Voting to create a law so blatantly in violation of the principles enshrined in the Bill of Rights is pretty clear evidence of "mental lack of fitness, incompetence," or "violation of oath of office."

source: http://www.salem-news.com/articles/december252011/ndaa-recall.php

My favorite candidate declares as a Libertarian--

2011-12-30T21:34:00.000-05:00

--and it's NOT Ron Paul. Governor Gary Johnson, of New Mexico, has been even more excluded from the process than Dr. Paul. Perhaps it's because Johnson doesn't have some "smoking memos" to pull out if he ever looks to be making too much progress? Here's Johnson's message to his supporters. I'll put his essential political positions in boldface:

This morning, I stepped before the microphones at a news conference in the New Mexico capitol and announced that I am seeking the Libertarian nomination for President of the United States. The Libertarian Party nominee will be on the ballot in all 50 states – as was the case in 2008.

It was both a difficult decision – and an easy one. It was difficult because I have a lot of Republican history, and a lot of Republican supporters. But in the final analysis, as many, many commentators have said since watching how I governed in New Mexico, I am a Libertarian - that is, someone who is fiscally very conservative but holds freedom-based positions on many social issues.

Frankly, I have been deeply disappointed by the treatment I received in the Republican nomination process. Other candidates with no national name identification like Herman Cain, Rick Santorum and Jon Huntsman were allowed to participate in the debates.

Incredibly candidates with no executive experience like Michelle Bachmann and Rick Santorum were allowed to participate while I, a successful two-term governor with a solid record of job creation, was arbitrarily excluded by elitist media organizations in New York. My appeals to the Republican National Chairman for basic fairness were ignored.

I had hoped to lay out a full libertarian message on all the issues in the Republican contest. I think this election needs a libertarian voice. While Ron Paul is a good man and a libertarian who I proudly endorsed for president in 2008, there is no guarantee he will be the Republican nominee.

When I announced that I was running for president, I promised you I would be a voice for bold ideas to bring government and its spending under control. I promised I would put my record as the ‘most fiscally conservative’ governor in the nation in front of the voters. And I said that, unlike too many Republican politicians, I think Americans’ government should be smaller and less intrusive and let people make decisions for themselves.

My Agenda for America is clear:
- I want to end deficit spending and cut federal spending by 43%.
- I want to enact the Fair Tax to stimulate real economic growth and jobs.
- I want to end the manipulation of our money by the Federal Reserve.
- I support the Second Amendment and oppose gun control.
- I oppose expensive foreign wars in places like Libya and Afghanistan.
- I support a woman’s right to choose.
- I support marriage equality for gay Americans as required by the Constitution.
- I support legalization of marijuana, which will save us billions and do no harm.
- I support returning strict adherence to Constitutional principles to our government.

It is clear that the elite national media and the political “ruling class” don’t want this message heard. It frightens them. It frightens them because they know our message is one that actually reflects the true beliefs of millions of Americans – and they don’t want those millions of people to know there really is a candidate for president who represents them, whether they are Republicans, Democrats, Independents or Libertarians.

Sadly neither the Republicans nor Democrats will offer this agenda to the American people.
They can’t handle the notion of a successful two-term governor, elected and reelected as a Republican in a Democrat state, who could veto 750 spending bills to shrink government — while refusing to play the special interest game or impose a social agenda on people who prefer to make their own judgments about “values”.

In other words, there is no room in the national two-party club for a candidate who actually proved that governing as a libertarian works – and whose platform on every issue is clearly supported by a majority of the American people.

Sometimes the best answer is the simplest. I’m a Libertarian in belief. I successfully governed as a Libertarian in everything but the name, and I am running for president as a Libertarian.
Even before I announced my decision, polls are showing that I would today gain more votes than any Libertarian presidential candidate in history – and have a very real impact on the election nationwide. And that is before our campaign even begins.

If I earn the Libertarian nomination, I will be on the ballot in all 50 states. I will not be held hostage to a system rigged for the wealthiest and best-known candidates in a handful of states who happen to have early primaries. And most important, we will offer a political “home” for millions of Americans who are not finding one in the current political establishment or its candidates.

I am excited. I am liberated. And I am committed to shaking the system as it has never been shaken before. Just the speculation that I might run as a Libertarian has garnered more national media attention than I ever received as a Republican candidate whose voice they didn’t’ want to hear.

Depending on which poll you read, at least 40% of Republicans are not satisfied with the “field” of candidates the media has produced for them. At least 1 in 4 Democrats is having real second thoughts about Barack Obama. Do the math, and it confirms what I have seen for months on the campaign trail: The only political majority in America today is the one made up of voters who are looking for leadership they haven’t found yet. America is ready for a President who will restore common sense to our fiscal and foreign policies and get government out of the boardroom and the bedroom.

A credible Libertarian candidate for president is the real path to liberty, opportunity, and a government that is put into its proper and limited role.

In a recent national poll 63% of Americans said they wished there was a third choice for 2012. There is, and I intend to educate the voters about what we offer America.

Together, you and I are going to offer that majority a choice. They will see that Your support in the past few months has created this amazing opportunity. I may be the messenger, but this isn’t about me. It is about seizing a moment in history and bringing America back from the brink.

I want you to be with me as we launch this great endeavor. I ask for your continued support. I ask for your advice. And I am asking for your contribution today to provide the spark for the movement we are igniting.

You are one of my most generous supporters, and I must depend on you to be as generous as you can once again. Please send your contribution of $2,000, $1,000, $500, or $250. It will be used wisely to take our message to every corner of this great country, and to provide a voice that will otherwise never be heard in 2012. Go to: Gary Johnson 2012.com.

As a candidate for the Libertarian Party nomination my campaign will be eligible for Federal Matching funds — which means whatever you send will ultimately be matched. A $100 contribution is worth $200. A $250 contribution is worth $500. Please send your maximum contribution today.

Thank you for your support and your friendship. It means more to me than you will ever know.

Sincerely,

Gary

P.S. For those who say my decision to run as the Libertarian Party candidate will only draw votes from the Republicans and re-elect President Obama let me predict that, as my full platform based on freedom becomes known, my candidacy will draw votes from both the Republicans and Democrats and many, many independents.

He is not a sure thing for the Libertarian nomination. Libertarians, like so many "parties of principle," can rip themselves apart arguing over points that most of the rest of world couldn't care less about.

(Do you know what they call a libertarian firing squad? An inward-facing circle.)

There are a lot of "big-L" libertarians I don't want to be associated with, politically or personally. But Gov. Johnson has some interesting ideas and he's managed to function as the executive of a state, in a real political system, and get things done for the better. He deserves better than he's received, so far, in this campaign season. I'd love to see him on every state ballot. I'd love to see him on stage during the presidential debates. That would be justice.

STRATFOR hacked by Anonymous--and so was I

2011-12-29T02:57:00.001-05:00

I have a grudging admiration for anonymous, the "non-group" of people using their hacking skills not to make a profit, but to bring political and social change. I've commented on them in the past. They were a case study of "gray area" and "non-hierarchical" actors in my class last semester on Terrorism. And while I think it's safe to call what they do cyber-crime, I don't see any real terrorist intent. More like a robin hood complex.

So imagine my surprise to learn I had been targeted by them (or by somebody using their name--that's the problem with non-groups with anonymous membership. Hell, *I* might be a member...). A few years ago I was a paid subscriber to STRATFOR, a private intelligence service. I'm still on their mailing list, reading the free newsletters and receiving offers to rejoin. STRATFOR's subscriber list is now on line, complete with names, email addresses, and the password used by that subscriber. And, apparently, the credit card numbers are available, too. Including mine.

(And no, I won't link to any of it it. You can find it for yourself, no doubt.)

In addition to providing a "who's-who" of government, corporate, and academic intel types (an interesting list, by the way--I should remember to save a copy for myself), anonymous threatens to use the numbers and passwords to make contributions to charities of their choice in the names of STRATFOR subscribers (robin hoods, remember?) and break into the files of those subscribers elsewhere.

I don't think I'm in any particular trouble. Not only am I not worth targeting, the information they have on me is old. I dropped that credit card years ago, and changed the number on my debit card a few weeks ago. I've regularly updated my passwords everywhere several time since I was a paid member, and the STRATFOR password opens nothing. All they really have is an email address, and that's public knowledge already. But it's an interesting experience. And I'm glad I decided, all those years ago, that a personal subscription to STRATFOR wasn't worth the cost.

Oh, and if you are from anonymous and reading this--no hard feelings.

How to recognize who you are dealing with

2011-12-28T15:08:00.001-05:00

In case you get confused this holiday season (too much eggnog, perhaps) Visually provides this handy guide to recognizing who you are dealing with.

If you are only interested in distinguishing TSA agents from everyone else, here's the simple rule: you don't ask, or pay, the TSA to do what they do, and you can't turn down their services.

Can it get any more stupid?

2011-12-27T16:10:00.000-05:00

Our ever-reforming, ever-improving, "open" government hit some new lows this year. The most amazing thing is that some can claim that they really are making progress. Compared to what?

Government report concludes the government classified 77 million documents in 2010, a 40% increase on the year before. The number of people with security clearances exceeded 4.2. million, more people than the city of Los Angeles.
Government tells Air Force families, including their kids, it’s illegal to read WikiLeaks. The month before, the Air Force barred its service members fighting abroad from reading the New York Times—the country’s Paper of Record.
Lawyers for Guantanamo detainees were barred from reading the WikiLeaks Guantanamo files, despite their contents being plastered on the front page of the New York Times.
President Obama refuses to say the words “drone” or “C.I.A” despite the C.I.A. drone program being on the front pages of the nation’s newspapers every day.
CIA refuses to release even a single passage from its center studying global warming, claiming it would damage national security. As Secrecy News' Steven Aftergood said, “That’s a familiar song, and it became tiresome long ago.”
The CIA demands former FBI agent Ali Soufan censor his book criticizing the CIA’s post 9/11 interrogation tactics of terrorism suspects. Much of the material, according to the New York Times, “has previously been disclosed in open Congressional hearings, the report of the national commission on 9/11 and even the 2007 memoir of George J. Tenet, the former C.I.A. director.”
Department of Homeland Security has become so bloated with secrecy that even the “office's budget, including how many employees and contractors it has, is classified,” according to the Center for Investigative reporting. Yet their intelligence reports “produce almost nothing you can’t find on Google,” said a former undersecretary.
Headline from the Wall Street Journal in September: “Anonymous US officials push open government.”
NSA declassified a 200 year old report which they said demonstrated its “commitment to meeting the requirements” of President Obama’s transparency agenda. Unfortunately, the document “had not met the government's own standards for classification in the first place,” according to J. William Leonard, former classification czar.
Government finally declassifies the Pentagon Papers 40 years after they appeared on the front page of the New York Times and were published by the House’s Armed Services Committee.
Secrecy expert Steve Aftergood concludes after two years “An Obama Administration initiative to curb overclassification of national security information… has produced no known results to date.”
President Obama accepts a transparency award…behind closed doors.
Government attorneys insist in court they can censor a book which was already published and freely available online.
Department of Justice refuses to release its interpretation of section 215 of the Patriot Act, a public law.
U.S. refuses to release its legal justification for killing an American citizen abroad without a trial, despite announcing the killing in a press conference.
U.S. won’t declassify legal opinion on 2001’s illegal warrantless wiretapping program.
National Archive announced it was working on declassifying “a backlog of nearly 400 million pages of material that should have been declassified a long time ago.”
The CIA refused to declassify Open Source Works, “which is the CIA’s in-house open source analysis component, is devoted to intelligence analysis of unclassified, open source information” according to Steve Aftergood.
Twenty-three year State Department veteran gets his security clearance revoked for linking to a WikiLeaks document on his blog.
The ACLU sued asking the State Department to declassify 23 cables out of the more than 250,000 released by WikiLeaks. After more than a year, the government withheld 12 in their entirety. You can see the other 11, heavily redacted, next to the unredacted copies on the ACLU website.

2011 in Review: The Year Secrecy Jumped the Shark | Electronic Frontier Foundation

Snakes on a plane

2011-12-27T15:54:00.000-05:00

It's getting to be you can't keep up with reality.

A Czech Man Actually Tried To Smuggle Snakes On A Plane

Get your own state!

2011-12-27T02:06:00.002-05:00

I love micronations. There's something appealing--and pleasantly eccentric--about sticking a flag on a rock, declaring it to be an independent country, and naming yourself emperor. Who hasn't wanted to do that, at one time or another? Especially at tax time? I've always admired Sealand.

And sometimes it seems the only way to avoid a big government is to set yourself in charge of a little one. Seriously, as states come under increasing pressure--and react to it with increasing centralization and restrictions on individuals--I wonder if this may be the wave of the future.

If not for all of us, at least for those who can afford it.

But for now, see Business Insider: Check Out 10 Of Europe's Oddest Micronations. Three examples:

Kingdom Of Elleore

Location: Denmark
Founded: 1944
Ruler: King Leo III
Estimated Population: Unknown. But the population grows in the summer time.
Estimated Size: 15,000 square meters.
About: A small island off Denmark's Northern coast, the Kingdom of Elleore was founded and declared independent when a group of school teachers bought it to organize a summer camp in 1944. The micronation has issued numerous stamps and coins and has had six monarchs since its independence.

BjornSocialist Republic

Location: Sweden
Founded: 2005
Ruler: President Oskar Augustsson
Estimated Population: Usually Zero.
Estimated Size: Six square meters.
About: Located on a stone that "looks like a tractor," this tiny socialist state near the Bos Islands doesn't recognize Swedish laws and has its own hymn. It made the news when Sweden refused to recognize a marriage between two citizens that allegedly took place on the tiny rock. It claims to be the smallest republic in the world.

Principality of Filettino

Location: ItalyFounded: 2011
Ruler: Luca Sellari
Estimated Population: 550
Estimated Size: 30 square miles
About: Demonstrating its frustration with Italy's economy and austerity measures, this village decided to break away from th Italian government in August this year. The village intended to invite Prince Emmanuel Filiberto from the deposed Italian royal family to be Prince of their principality.

See the others at Business Insider. And don't forget to renew your passport for Sealand!

A lesson for analysts

2011-12-22T00:42:00.000-05:00

From the December 15th edition of Nightwatch, one of the best sources on current events:

NightWatchFor the night of 15 December 2011

Administrative note:NightWatch will not be published this night in honor of the official end of theUS intervention in Iraq. Now Iraq can rediscover a new Arab normality andidentity.

Lesson for new analysts: Whenever a senior official of any government feels theneed to assert in public that a nine-year military commitment was worth it,that assessment obviously is not self-evident.

I have nothing to add.

Comparative politics

2011-12-21T19:25:00.001-05:00

Kim Jong Il is dead. He was a treacherous little monster, and he left a pathetic little empire. Vaclav Havel is also dead, a man described by James Fallows as one who "helped make the world more decent and promising, through his combination of literary skill, civic responsibility, and deep humaneness."

Guess which one got the most attention in the press? Guess which one had more tears--real or otherwise--shed for his passing?

“It is much more secure to be feared than to be loved. ”
--Nicolo Machiavelli

It was a matter of time

2011-12-21T19:09:00.002-05:00

Mubarak is out because he had outlived his usefulness to the military, and now more of the Egyptian people are realizing it. The big question: will the military find enough common ground with the Islamists to keep control of the sectors each cares about the most?

Well, that didn't take long...

2011-12-19T18:38:00.001-05:00

One day after the US forces officially leave Iraq,

Nuri al-Maliki plunged Iraq into political turmoi by ordering the arrest of Tareq al-Hashemi, his respected Sunni vice president, on terrorism charges.

Further escalating tensions, he also asked parliament to hold a no-confidence vote to allow him to dismiss Saleh al-Mutlak, the Sunni deputy prime minister, who angered Mr Maliki by describing him as a "dictator" during a television interview last week.

Mr Hashemi was briefly detained after being escorted of a plane at Baghdad's airport, where he was attempting to catch a flight to the Kurdish city of Irbil, prompting speculation that he was attempting to flee.

Although Mr Hashemi was released, three of his bodyguards were arrested for "suspected terrorist activity". Following frantic negotiations brokered by the United States and Kurdish political leaders, Mr Maliki was said to have agreed not to implement the arrest warrant for now.

But last night, judges barred Mr Hashemi from travelling overseas shortly before the arrest warrant was formally issued. Tanks were also deployed outside his home, as well as outside the houses of Mr Mutlak and a third senior Sunni politician.

It's not unexpected, but you'd hope he'd at least have the courtesy to not immediately embarass President Obama. I suppose nobody wants to late to the Civil War.

The "complex"

2011-12-18T01:05:00.000-05:00

Some people hate and distrust "big business." Some people hate and distrust "big government." And so often they argue with one another: Tea-Party versus Occupy, if you were. Yet when you get down to details it doesn't really make sense to fight about. Big business or bid government, it's often the same people. A case in point:

So what are we arguing about?

It's a wonder anyone ever trusts eyewitness testimony

2011-12-17T21:54:00.003-05:00

Just follow the instructions. How did you do?

A few "secrets"

2011-12-17T21:00:00.005-05:00

This is stuff I've already seen in the public domain, but the article at Danger Room does a good job of summing up some of the "secret" military and intelligence programs most people don't hear about.

I gotta wonder what hasn't been revealed (yet).

The war on poverty is over. Poverty won.

2011-12-17T20:51:00.004-05:00

I don't know whether to trust all these statistics. But they do seem to coincide with what I see when I monitor the current situation. The guy who compiled them blames the Federal Reserve for all the problems, despite the fact that we also had a Fed through the post-war boom, etc. It's part of what has been going on, but only part. Nevertheless, here's some statistics:

#1 A staggering 48 percent of all Americans are either considered to be "low income" or are living in poverty.
#2 Approximately 57 percent of all children in the United States are living in homes that are either considered to be "low income" or impoverished.
#3 If the number of Americans that "wanted jobs" was the same today as it was back in 2007, the "official" unemployment rate put out by the U.S. government would be up to 11 percent.
#4 The average amount of time that a worker stays unemployed in the United States is now over 40 weeks.
#5 One recent survey found that 77 percent of all U.S. small businesses do not plan to hire any more workers.
#6 There are fewer payroll jobs in the United States today than there were back in 2000 even though we have added 30 million extra people to the population since then.
#7 Since December 2007, median household income in the United States has declined by a total of 6.8% once you account for inflation.
#8 According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 16.6 million Americans were self-employed back in December 2006. Today, that number has shrunk to 14.5 million.
#9 A Gallup poll from earlier this year found that approximately one out of every five Americans that do have a job consider themselves to be underemployed.
#10 According to author Paul Osterman, about 20 percent of all U.S. adults are currently working jobs that pay poverty-level wages.
#11 Back in 1980, less than 30% of all jobs in the United States were low income jobs. Today, more than 40% of all jobs in the United States are low income jobs.
#12 Back in 1969, 95 percent of all men between the ages of 25 and 54 had a job. In July, only 81.2 percent of men in that age group had a job.
#13 One recent survey found that one out of every three Americans would not be able to make a mortgage or rent payment next month if they suddenly lost their current job.
#14 The Federal Reserve recently announced that the total net worth of U.S. households declined by 4.1 percent in the 3rd quarter of 2011 alone.
#15 According to a recent study conducted by the BlackRock Investment Institute, the ratio of household debt to personal income in the United States is now 154 percent.
#16 As the economy has slowed down, so has the number of marriages. According to a Pew Research Center analysis, only 51 percent of all Americans that are at least 18 years old are currently married. Back in 1960, 72 percentof all U.S. adults were married.
#17 The U.S. Postal Service has lost more than 5 billion dollars over the past year.
#18 In Stockton, California home prices have declined 64 percent from where they were at when the housing market peaked.
#19 Nevada has had the highest foreclosure rate in the nation for 59 monthsin a row.
#20 If you can believe it, the median price of a home in Detroit is now just $6000.
#21 According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 18 percent of all homes in the state of Florida are sitting vacant. That figure is 63 percent larger than it was just ten years ago.
#22 New home construction in the United States is on pace to set a brand new all-time record low in 2011.
#23 As I have written about previously, 19 percent of all American men between the ages of 25 and 34 are now living with their parents.
#24 Electricity bills in the United States have risen faster than the overall rate of inflation for five years in a row.
#25 According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, health care costs accounted for just 9.5% of all personal consumption back in 1980. Today they account for approximately 16.3%.
#26 One study found that approximately 41 percent of all working age Americans either have medical bill problems or are currently paying off medical debt.
#27 If you can believe it, one out of every seven Americans has at least 10 credit cards.
#28 The United States spends about 4 dollars on goods and services from China for every one dollar that China spends on goods and services from the United States.
#29 It is being projected that the U.S. trade deficit for 2011 will be 558.2 billion dollars.
#30 The retirement crisis in the United States just continues to get worse. According to the Employee Benefit Research Institute, 46 percent of all American workers have less than $10,000 saved for retirement, and 29 percent of all American workers have less than $1,000 saved for retirement.
#31 Today, one out of every six elderly Americans lives below the federal poverty line.
#32 According to a study that was just released, CEO pay at America's biggest companies rose by 36.5% in just one recent 12 month period.
#33 Today, the "too big to fail" banks are larger than ever. The total assets of the six largest U.S. banks increased by 39 percent between September 30, 2006 and September 30, 2011.
#34 The six heirs of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton have a net worth that is roughly equal to the bottom 30 percent of all Americans combined.
#35 According to an analysis of Census Bureau data done by the Pew Research Center, the median net worth for households led by someone 65 years of age or older is 47 times greater than the median net worth for households led by someone under the age of 35.
#36 If you can believe it, 37 percent of all U.S. households that are led by someone under the age of 35 have a net worth of zero or less than zero.
#37 A higher percentage of Americans is living in extreme poverty (6.7%) than has ever been measured before.
#38 Child homelessness in the United States is now 33 percent higher than it was back in 2007.
#39 Since 2007, the number of children living in poverty in the state of California has increased by 30 percent.
#40 Sadly, child poverty is absolutely exploding all over America. According to the National Center for Children in Poverty, 36.4% of all children that live in Philadelphia are living in poverty, 40.1% of all children that live in Atlanta are living in poverty, 52.6% of all children that live in Cleveland are living in poverty and 53.6% of all children that live in Detroit are living in poverty.
#41 Today, one out of every seven Americans is on food stamps and one out of every four American children is on food stamps.
#42 In 1980, government transfer payments accounted for just 11.7% of all income. Today, government transfer payments account for more than 18 percent of all income.
#43 A staggering 48.5% of all Americans live in a household that receives some form of government benefits. Back in 1983, that number was below 30 percent.
#44 Right now, spending by the federal government accounts for about 24 percent of GDP. Back in 2001, it accounted for just 18 percent.
#45 For fiscal year 2011, the U.S. federal government had a budget deficit ofnearly 1.3 trillion dollars. That was the third year in a row that our budget deficit has topped one trillion dollars.
#46 If Bill Gates gave every single penny of his fortune to the U.S. government, it would only cover the U.S. budget deficit for about 15 days.
#47 Amazingly, the U.S. government has now accumulated a total debt of 15 trillion dollars. When Barack Obama first took office the national debt was just 10.6 trillion dollars.
#48 If the federal government began right at this moment to repay the U.S. national debt at a rate of one dollar per second, it would take over 440,000 years to pay off the national debt.
#49 The U.S. national debt has been increasing by an average of more than 4 billion dollars per day since the beginning of the Obama administration.
#50 During the Obama administration, the U.S. government has accumulated more debt than it did from the time that George Washington took office to the time that Bill Clinton took office.

Check out the ones you doubt. Let me know if any are misrepresentations. At first glance, it looks like things are worse than most people (especially government) would like to admit.

The Navy of the future

2011-12-14T12:11:00.003-05:00

Crap. I really hope this is wrong.

2011-12-12T21:56:00.000-05:00

I'm not sure what bothers me more: that this might be true, or that the only place to get the story is from the alternative media and the Iranians. One whistleblower site working on the story reports that an Iraqi journalist based in London has told them

"Some of the US forces that left the Ain al-Assad Air base in Iraq last Thursday, did not come back to the USA or its base in Germany, but were transferred to Jordan during the evening hours.”

Furthermore, they add

Update 1: Today at 12:00 P.M. we contacted DOD Press Office via two voicemail messages and one e-mail asking for comment(s) on this story. As of 6:00 P.M. EST we have not heard back.

Update 2: Another journalist with a major mainstream media publication was told by his editors that there would be no coverage or follow up on these developments.

Maybe it isn't what it looks like. But it sure looks like the media have agreed what to NOT tell the American people. Again.

Keep your eyes open.

Practicing to block the Straight of Hormuz

2011-12-12T12:22:00.000-05:00

Member of the Iranian Parliament says the military was set to practice operations to block the Straight of Hormuz, one of the key choke points for world energy supplies. The Iranian military has not confirmed this, but you can probably expect a rise in oil prices just on the emotional impact of the possibility.

As it is, most of the crude oil and liquefied natural gas of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Iraq, the Emirates (and Iran) have to pass through the four-mile wide shipping channel, currently patrolled by the U.S. Navy.

UPDATE 1-Iran army declines comment on MP's Hormuz exercise remarks | Energy & Oil | Reuters

Oil on the flames (cute title, huh?)

2011-12-12T11:28:00.000-05:00

Exxon-Mobil is throwing in with the Kurds in the upcoming battle over Iraq. The battle takes off again.

Whatever the prospects of finding oil in the north of Iraq, observers are surprised that Exxon is prepared to hang its future in Iraq on the outcome of the power struggle between Iraqi Kurdistan and the central government. Control of the right to explore for oil and exploit it is crucial to the authorities on both sides since they have virtually no other source of revenue.

The Kurds have won a degree of autonomy close to independence since the fall of Saddam, and the ability to sign oil contracts without reference to Baghdad will be another step towards practical independence and the break-up of Iraq. A parallel would be if the Scottish government were to sign exploration contracts in the North Sea without consulting London.

What makes the Exxon-KRG deal particularly inflammatory, says Mr Shahristani, is that three of the six blocs where Exxon is planning to drill are understood to be "across the blue line – that is outside the border of the KRG". This means they are in the large areas in northern Iraq disputed between Arabs and Kurds since 2003, but where the Kurds have military control.

The government must now decide if it will make good on its threats and replace Exxon at a mammoth oil field called West Qurna 1 at the other end of the country, north of Basra. Iraqi oil officials hint that Royal Dutch Shell might replace the American company.

Both sides have much at stake. The Iraqi government is totally reliant on its oil revenues to pay its soldiers, police force and civilian officials. It needs vast sums to rebuild the country after 30 years of war, civil war and sanctions. In 2009, it began to expand its oil industry by signing contracts with firms such as BP, Royal Dutch Shell and Exxon to boost production in under-exploited and poorly maintained fields.

These companies thereby gained access to some of the largest fields in the world, each with reserves of more than five billion barrels. Vast sums are being invested, mostly around Basra in the south of Iraq. Oil output, now at 2.9 million barrels a day, is due to rise to a production capacity of 12 million b/d by 2017, potentially putting Iraq on a par with Saudi Arabia as an oil exporter.

Since the Kurds have had a bad deal for generations, my sympathies are with the Kurds. But even if they succeed to get the state they want, the transition is going to be hard.

Exxon's deal with the Kurds inflames Baghdad

The Eurozone

2011-12-06T11:09:00.001-05:00

Thanks to Frank Jacobs and his Strange Maps.

Hunting season in western Pennsylvania

2011-12-02T12:53:00.001-05:00

thanks to Thomas Ricks for the photo

"Tricky Mitt" Romney

2011-12-02T10:47:00.001-05:00

Lately, I've been thinking about an old classic book in political science: The Making the the President. It followed the campaign of 1968, showing the controlled, professional, image-manipulating, divisive, strategic path followed by Richard Nixon to the White House. Hardly anyone "liked" Nixon. He wasn't seen as particularly trustworthy. He didn't like crowds, or campaigning, or the press. He kept to a script, and promised a vague "secret plan" to manage peace with honor in Vietnam. The best thing you could say about him was that he was not Lyndon Johnson's heir apparent, and even then it was a close-run election.

Sound like anyone we know?

Policy wonks rejoice!

2011-11-30T00:16:00.001-05:00

Economists Get Online Platform for Policy Debates - WSJ.com

Everyone else--it might prove to be an excellent cure for insomnia.

Boldly going where we've never been before

2011-11-29T14:06:00.000-05:00

From the Institute for the Future, a visualization of trends and where they may be leading us

A look at 'the future of science: 2021, from CNN.com

Would anyone care to speculate on what some of these imply for politics and economics? It sometimes seems like most political discussion is analogous to medieval debates over angels, pins, and biblical interpretation. I suppose it seems important in its own context, but the world is passing it by.

An important lesson for researchers

2011-11-28T20:15:00.001-05:00

Is that a cup holder on the front?

2011-11-28T20:10:00.000-05:00

Mega-rover ready to hunt for life signs on Mars - New Scientist

Here we go again?

2011-11-28T15:29:00.000-05:00

Explosion near Iran nuclear facility in Isfahan reported | World news | guardian.co.uk

Once is happenstance.

Twice is coincidence.

Three times is enemy action.

'via Blog this'

Perception management? In America?

2011-11-28T11:48:00.001-05:00

The impossible triangle

2011-11-26T21:06:00.000-05:00

It's coming down to the crunch. The Eurozone is caught in its version of the "Impossible Triangle" in international finance: among states you can have unrestricted trade in currencies and/or fixed exchange rates (or, in this case, a single currency) and/or sovereign financial and monetary policies, BUT YOU CAN'T HAVE ALL THREE AT THE SAME TIME. Something has to give. So what will it be?

EUROPE: Changing The Rules In The Middle Of The Game:

I have been writing for a very long time about the changes needed to the EU treaty if Europe is to survive. Specifically, last week I noted that Angela Merkel has made it clear that the independence of the ECB must not be compromised. This week Sarkozy and the new prime minister of Italy, Mario Monti, agreed to stop their public calls for such changes (at least until their own crises get even worse, would be my guess). And Merkel has called for a new, stronger union with strict control of budgets as the price for further German aid for those countries in crisis. In seeming response:

“The European Commission on November 23 proposed a new package including budget previews at EU level, the establishment of independent fiscal councils and growth forecasts, closer surveillance of bailout recipients and a consultation paper on Eurobonds. There is also a growing consensus among EU policy makers on the need for the adoption of fiscal rules in national legislation. However, it is far from clear whether EU countries would accept the implicit loss of sovereignty this would involve and agree to treaty changes enshrining legally enforceable fiscal oversight at EU level. The German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, is willing to support a change in Germany’s own constitution if the EU Treaty change to that effect is agreed first.” ( www.roubini.com)But this means a major treaty change that must be approved by all member countries. Note that Merkel wants the treaty change first, or at least the language, before she takes it to German voters, which will certainly be required, since what she is suggesting is not allowed by the present German constitution. Without the changes stated clearly and explicitly in advance, it is unlikely, as I read the polls, that German voters will go along. Merkel has made it clear that any proposed changes will be limited to fiscal issues and central control and not touch on the ECB’s independence. She is adamant against eurozone bonds and putting the German balance sheet at risk (see more below).

But will the rest of Europe go along with what would be a major alterations of their own individual sovereignty and their ability to adjust their own budgets, no matter what? And agree to all this in time to deal with the current crisis? Such changes will be controversial, to say the least. And they would require, if I understand, the yes votes of all 27 European Union members, or at a minimum the 17 eurozone members.

Unfortunately (?), some, but not everyone, are panicing:

On Friday, Standard & Poor’s downgraded Belgium’s credit standing to AA from AA+, saying it might not be able to cut its towering debt load any time soon. Ratings agencies this week cautioned that France could lose its AAA rating if the crisis grew. On Thursday, agencies lowered the ratings of Portugal and Hungary to junk.

While European leaders still say there is no need to draw up a Plan B, some of the world’s biggest banks, and their supervisors, are doing just that. “We cannot be, and are not, complacent on this front,” Andrew Bailey, a regulator at Britain’s Financial Services Authority, said this week. “We must not ignore the prospect of a disorderly departure of some countries from the euro zone,” he said.

Banks including Merrill Lynch, Barclays Capital and Nomura issued a cascade of reports this week examining the likelihood of a breakup of the euro zone. “The euro zone financial crisis has entered a far more dangerous phase,” analysts at Nomura wrote on Friday. Unless the European Central Bank steps in to help where politicians have failed, “a euro breakup now appears probable rather than possible,” the bank said.

Major British financial institutions, like the Royal Bank of Scotland, are drawing up contingency plans in case the unthinkable veers toward reality, bank supervisors said Thursday. United States regulators have been pushing American banks like Citigroup and others to reduce their exposure to the euro zone. In Asia, authorities in Hong Kong have stepped up their monitoring of the international exposure of foreign and local banks in light of the European crisis.

But banks in big euro zone countries that have only recently been infected by the crisis do not seem to be nearly as flustered.

Banks in France and Italy in particular are not creating backup plans, bankers say, for the simple reason that they have concluded it is impossible for the euro to break up. Although banks like BNP Paribas, Société Générale, UniCredit and others recently dumped tens of billions of euros worth of European sovereign debt, the thinking is that there is little reason to do mo

Evidently, the French banks are convinced someone MUST save them. Denial?

'via Blog this'

Police militarization

2011-11-26T17:39:00.001-05:00

Cops have a right to clear a public sidewalk, if that sidewalk is being blocked.
Cops have a right to physically move protesters off of a public sidewalk.
Cops do NOT have the right to use "nonlethal" weapons (a misnomer in any case) against a small group engaged in passive resistance. Many are trained to do this, as part of the general trend of "militarizing" the police. Maybe--just maybe--people will begin to realize how wrong it is.

No room to cut the "defense" budget?

2011-11-22T10:47:00.001-05:00

Of course, comparing expenditures is a crude measure of capabilities, but

I think there must be SOME room to trim. Pity that if the DoD has its way the cuts will probably protect the pork at the expense of the things (like training) that are really needed.

UNCTAD sounds the alarm (again)

2011-11-21T21:20:00.000-05:00

DocuBase Article: Least Developed Countries Report 2011

Where have the troops been?

2011-11-21T14:05:00.001-05:00

American troop deployments: Boots on the ground | The Economist

Hard talk

2011-11-20T18:07:00.000-05:00

I mentioned this in class the other day. The whole interview (from BBC) is worth the time. For many people, the idea of "saving" the Eurozone is turning into a (sad) joke. One of my favorite quotes:

"...you know how screwed up Europe is when you have a German pope and an Italian central banker."

The real fun begins around the 12:30 mark.

This is why the enterprise needs a view screen

2011-11-20T17:37:00.000-05:00

...instead of just looking out the window.

New Scientist TV: Seeing Relativity: Mind-bending tour of the solar system

Science can be cool.

One nation under law

2011-11-20T17:23:00.001-05:00

Globalization

2011-11-18T12:26:00.001-05:00

A view of the global transportation system.

Yet another World Wide Web.

"Seal Team Geronimo" is a big fat lie

2011-11-17T14:36:00.000-05:00

Can I be any more clear about this? The sources suck, the analysis is self-serving, and the conclusions--particularly in regard to WMD--are insupportable.

Or let's get another opinion--from Danger Room:

Author Chuck Pfarrer is taking flack over his account of the Osama bin Laden raid in his new revisionist history, SEAL Target Geronimo. But that’s overshadowed another big problem with the book: Pfarrer’s claims about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction are absolutely bananas.
To read SEAL Target Geronimo is to get sucked into a vortex of WMD insanity. Pfarrer says that Saddam Hussein had dangerous, active chemical, biological and nuclear programs up until the day of his downfall. Worse, those weapons made it into the hands of Osama himself. Why didn’t you know about it? Because craven politicians and the lying media hid the truth about what U.S. military weapons experts uncovered.
Well, sorry, Charlie. I was one of those military experts in Iraq. I learned the full, underwhelming truth about Saddam’s programs because I was there to help the Iraqis settle the issue once and for all. And SEAL Target Geronimo’s claims are the literary equivalent of a smoking gun that could have been a mushroom cloud — a paranoid, evidence-free fantasy, fueled by ignorance.
Start with all that Iraqi WMD that U.S. forces found. Pfarrer gasps over an Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit’s 2003 discovery of an artillery shell filled with the nerve agent sarin, part of an early homemade bomb. To Pfarrer, that bomb would have “spread a mortal, invisible cloud over a dozen city blocks” where “death would have come quickly for ten thousand Iraqi civilians living near the airport and three thousand coalition troops stationed at nearby Camp Victory.” If two of those sarin-laced bombs went off in a crowded football stadium, it would have caused more casualties than “those suffered by the United States during the entire Vietnam War.” His emphasis.
Absolutely none of this is plausible. You’re talking about a piece of steel that needs to survive being fired out of an artillery piece, and then burst apart by explosives in order to disseminate the chemicals inside. Much of the chemical material is destroyed in the process. And it would take a lot of sarin to achieve any deadly effect. Saddam’s vicious gassing of the Kurds at Halabja in March 1988, for example, was a coordinated military campaign lasting for two days. During that time, the Iraqis murdered up to 5,000 people — nowhere near Pfarrer’s stadium scenario. An actual chemical artillery round might — might — kill dozens. Not thousands.

This sounds a lot more plausible to me. If the rest of the book is as inaccurate as this--and so far as I've seen, it seems to be--I can only wonder about the agendas of those promoting and publishing it.

Law and the banks

2011-11-17T14:23:00.000-05:00

It does seem that way, don't it?

Congress is less popular than the IRS

2011-11-17T14:20:00.000-05:00

From the Washington Post: Congress is less popular than the US going Communist.

Constructing a God

2011-09-30T12:52:00.000-04:00

How does one turn a nobody into a God?

It is a telling sign of who is the rising star in North Korea: state-run television showing octogenarian party secretaries bowing to a man their grandchildren’s age before accepting the smiling young man’s handshake or kowtowing to his instructions.

****
When Kim Jong-un, thought to be in his late 20s, emerged from obscurity a year ago this past week as a four-star general and vice chairman of the Workers’ Party’s Central Military Commission, the first thing the outside world noticed was the obesity he appeared to have inherited from his father and his grandfather, the late North Korean founder Kim Il-sung. (Some South Korean news media outlets speculate that he may have undergone plastic surgery to more closely resemble his grandfather, a godlike figure among North Koreans.)
A year on, it appears increasingly clear that the regime is helping Kim Jong-un inherit a personality cult of his own. On state TV, he is packaged to look like his grandfather: Mao suit, swept-back hair and the gravitas North Koreans associate with the “Great Leader,” who died in 1994. Less clear is whether the ruthless cunning that has intimidated generals and party elders is his or his father’s. Key to the political dynamics surrounding the succession in Pyongyang, analysts say, is whether Kim Jong-il can live long enough to provide his son with whatever assistance he may need to settle into power.

I suppose it's a little easier when you are taking over the family business.

A Year On, North Korea’s ‘Dear Young General’ Has Made His Mark - NYTimes.com:

Creeping towards statehood?

2011-09-30T12:44:00.000-04:00

Eight down, one to go, in the Security Council.

With eight apparently committed yeses (Russia, China, India, South Africa, Brazil, Lebanon, Nigeria and Gabon), the focus is now on convincing Bosnia to provide that last vote, with a somewhat less hopeful path ofconvincing either Colombia or Portugal.
Malki is expected to visit Bosnia soon, while Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is scheduled to visit both Colombia and Portugal in October. Bosnia, which itself only gained independence in 1992, is seen as most likely to be supportive.
This might be doubly so after the European Parliament today adopted a unanimous resolution supporting the right of the Palestinians to have an independent nation. Bosnia, though not yet an EU member, is currently pushing for membership.

Of course, the US pledges to veto.

EU, Eight UNSC Members Back Palestine Statehood -- News from Antiwar.com:

Telling it like it is

2011-09-27T10:55:00.000-04:00

As usual, the traders (whose livelihood depends on having clear perceptions) are a lot more accurate than the politicians (whose livelihood depend on distorting the perceptions of others) and more likely to tell it as it is.*

*Unless they are on CNBC, or course, where their primary job is to sell bad stock tips to gullible investors.

UPDATE (Sept. 30th): It appears this guy's a real clown. Not a professional trader, runs a failing professional speaker's business. On the other hand, he's not one of the "Yes Men" and he's saying what many are saying elsewhere--just not on BBC.

Anonymous

2011-09-27T10:44:00.000-04:00

Sometimes, I just have to love these guys.

Syria: Official Websites Under Anonymous Attack · Global Voices:

For the undergraduate IR student

2011-09-27T09:19:00.000-04:00

Freshmen with an interest in international relations ask me where they should start. What should they read? Fortunately, Steven Walt has put together a very good list.

My "top ten" books every student of International Relations should read | Stephen M. Walt:

They're not necessarily "the best," nor are they a complete list, but they are classics, relatively easy to read, and give you a feed for how people who analyze this stuff for a living think.

A long comment in reply to an interesting thread

2011-08-29T14:48:00.000-04:00

From Fabius Maximus, of course. For this to make sense, the thread here: Our fears are unwarranted. America is in fact well-governed.

I’ve been using the sheep analogy in my classes for years. Most don’t like to take its implications seriously. It also contributes to a tendency to give up and submit in those rare instances when a group of committed individuals can make a positive difference. (There are more opportunities to make a negative difference–but not all that many of them, either.)

Regarding some other comments:

“The species as a collective may have a good deal, but it is far from optimal for most individuals.”

Evolution is about the survival of groups. If it selected the optimum for individuals, we’d be immortal.

“Our leaders incite fear to build support for policy changes. … They will steer America away from the rocks because they own most of it.” – FM

Be careful not to assume “our leaders” are American–or think of themselves as American–let alone public officials. In a globalizing world, you get global elites. Global ownership. Global interests. If what’s best for the elite(s) is to allow some particularly stupid and needy sheep to die in order to maximize wealth extraction from the herd as a whole, it may be a regrettable but rational move. This may also include culling the flock.

“You have an overabundance of confidence in the competency of our ruling class to steer the boat.”–ruralcounsel

Sometimes that seems like the best hope for something like a liberal republic. If the some elite(s) in power really screw up, in a liberal republic there is a relatively nonviolent mechanism to co-opt more competent critics. Moreover, in the long run a sense of personal reward and personal control among the sheep (read “rights”) encourages more production, and thus more to extract. When that breaks down _and_ the elite(s) can no longer govern themselves–a situation we are increasingly in today–some counter-elite with greater self-discipline and competence still emerges, within or without, to replace the failures.

But the transition is usually a lot more messy.

What we don't know can't hurt us. Right?

2011-08-05T19:56:00.001-04:00

As if the written provisions of the PATRIOT Act weren't bad enough, Danger Room | Wired.com reports

Two Senators have been warning for months that the government has a secret legal interpretation of the Patriot Act so broad that it amounts to an entirely different law — one that gives the feds massive domestic surveillance powers, and keeps the rest of us in the dark about the snooping.

“There is a significant discrepancy between what most Americans – including many members of Congress – think the Patriot Act allows the government to do and how government officials interpret that same law,” wrote the Senators, Ron Wyden and Mark Udall. “We believe that most members of the American public would be very surprised to learn how federal surveillance law is being interpreted in secret. ”"

Of course, most Americans--and most Senators--don't care.

Ideas have consequences

2011-08-04T15:16:00.001-04:00

Especially economic ideas. For example, what we assume about discounting the future--whatever we assume--likely leads to error. It does, however, clothe our assumptions in the image of "science."

Mark Buchanan - Bloomberg:

Pretend, for example, that we want to see if it is worth creating a costly marine sanctuary that could take many years to establish and even longer to effectively protect a population of endangered salmon or cod. The costs of the sanctuary come mainly in the first years -- the expense of setting it up and policing it, as well as perhaps millions of dollars a year in lost fishing revenue. The most important benefits, on the other hand, may come in the distant future. Even if the fish population might increase 100-fold, creating a sustainable fishing industry 500 years from now that is far more valuable than today’s, economists would discount the advantages coming in those distant years almost to nothing.
*************

[But]...Geanakoplos and Farmer find that the correct formulas for discounting over long periods don’t follow the textbook exponential form. The math is tricky (I’ve put some discussion of the technical stuff on my blog. But the consequences are not. Using a standard model from finance for interest rate movements (with an average rate of 4 percent), the authors show that, for the first 100 years or so, their correct form of discounting gives results that are similar to those that come from traditional calculations. But at 500 years the standard exponential discounts the future not just a little too strongly, but a million times too strongly. And it gets worse after that.
Going back to the example of the marine sanctuary, and using the Geanakoplos-Farmer formula, you find that the present value of benefits 500 years from now gets multiplied millions of times compared with the standard analysis. A thriving marine ecosystem in the future, linked with a much larger fishing industry, might well be worth investing in today.
In effect, today’s standard economic methods make the distant future count for almost nothing. And those who always thought this seemed hopelessly naïve turn out to be right.

We really need new ways to think about economics. Several people are trying to create them, but these people not only have serious methodological problems to overcome--there are entrenched interests that profit from keeping our indicators and analysis techniques as they are.

Telling it straight

2011-08-03T11:08:00.004-04:00

One of the nice things about quality financial writing is it not only tells you what's going on, it does it in a clear and personal way. If I want to know what's going on, I usually find more value in the Wall Street Journal than the New York Times, and FAR more than anything coming out of Washington. This is because if you are financial advisor--and you're not "too big to fail"--you need to tell your clients the truth as you see it.

A good example of this is a recent letter from Oaktree Capital Management to its members. The letter was posted online by Oaktree (here), and it's pre-"compromise," so I assume I can now quote a couple of paragraphs. (If I'm wrong, let me know and I'll immediately remove this post.)

One of the most striking aspects of debt in the modern era is that little if any
attention is paid to repayment of principal. No one pays off their debt. They merely
roll it over . . . and add to it. Thus credit ratings are highly deficient (shocker!) in a way
that few people talk about. What ratings describe isn’t the borrower’s ability to repay
principal, but its ability to make interest payments and refinance principal. But the
assessment of their ability to roll their debt – likewise – isn’t based on an ability to repay,
but rather to refinance again. So ultimately the security of capital providers stems not
from the borrower, but from the continued willingness of other capital providers to roll
debts in the future. (It was their occasional refusal in 2007-08 that caused the worst
moments of the financial crisis.)

With no one asking how debt could be repaid, nations were allowed for decades to
increase their deficits and debt non-stop relative to their GDP. And then, in the first
quarter of 2010, the little boy stepped out from the crowd, took note of the
emperor’s non-existent new clothes, and said “Hey, wait a minute: Greece will never
be able to repay even the debt it has, forgetting that it takes on more all the time. Its
economy is non-competitive and stagnant, and tax compliance is non-existent. They
shouldn’t be able to borrow.”

That’s all it took. Greece was denied further credit. And then people took a look around
peripheral Europe and saw more of the same. Today, although the situation is nowhere
as dire, they’re also looking at the U.S. and some of its states.

The entire letter is a thirteen page pdf, and well worth a read.

Who has the troops?

2011-07-27T17:34:00.001-04:00

The Size Of The World's Military Forces

Make of it what you will.

Little support to 'pay troops first'

2011-07-27T17:25:00.000-04:00

Military.com:

This seems shortsighted--and evil.

Two weeks after a Texas congressman tried force a House vote on his bill mandating that servicemembers be paid first in the event of a government shutdown, only nine representatives have signed on.

The so-called discharge petition requires 218 signatures.

Show me your budget, and I'll show you your priorities.

IR "isms" are like reality television

2011-07-27T17:16:00.001-04:00

The Duck of Minerva:

It may be intellectually sloppy, but it can be the fastest way to get noticed.

International relations scholars like ‘isms’ for the same reason that television execs like reality TV. They have much lower production costs, as they are much less arduous and cognitively taxing than intense empirical work, which is the equivalent of scripted television. For regular workaday scholars, they are just the kind of brainless thing to sit down and read after a long, mentally tiring day. ‘Iron Chef’ trumps ‘The Wire’ any day. They might feel guilty about it, but this is what they end up talking about at the hotel bar at conferences, which is closest thing to a water cooler that international relations scholars have.
There are still outlets for non-‘ism’ work in excellent niche journals with a more narrow readership, where nuance and sophistication are still important, much like cable TV. But whatever you do, do not start blogging. That is a ticket straight to the D-List.

Love the analogy. If you are into this stuff at all, you'll want to read the whole thing.

The world's most pathetic superhero?

2011-07-25T11:48:00.000-04:00

Captain Euro

The Klingon threat

2011-07-25T11:29:00.001-04:00

Klingons invade Vulcan! (Ontario)

Intended and unintended consequences

2011-07-25T11:20:00.000-04:00

From Mickey Edwards, The Atlantic:

Ours is a system focused not on collective problem-solving but on a struggle for power between two private organizations. Party activists control access to the ballot through closed party primaries and conventions; partisan leaders design congressional districts. Once elected to Congress, our representatives are divided into warring camps. Partisans decide what bills to take up, what witnesses to hear, what amendments to allow.

Many Americans assume that’s just how democracy works, that this is how it’s always been, that it’s the system the Founders created. But what we have today is a far cry from what the Founders intended.

Worth a read. Good analysis, thoughtful suggestions for change.

Rare honesty

2011-07-21T14:53:00.000-04:00

Michael Hudson has a lauditory (and rare) skill: he's an economist who tells the unvarnished truth.

From Wall Street’s Euthanasia of Industry | Michael Hudson:

[Interviewer] "Michael, I read the in the newspapers that the great recession, so-called, has long since ended, but unemployment remains stubbornly high with only a measly 18,000 jobs created in June. I believe the term that was coined some time ago is a jobless recovery. What is a jobless recovery?

[Hudson] We call that a depression – in this case, caused mainly by debt deflation. Just because the stock market is being inflated by the Federal Reserve doesn’t mean that the economy itself is growing. It’s shrinking – from a combination of families and businesses having to pay off debts rather than spend their income on goods and services, and the government’s shift of taxes off finance, insurance and real estate (FIRE) onto labor and industry."

There's a lot more where that came from.

Famine and carry-out

2011-07-21T14:12:00.000-04:00

From 20 July Nightwatch:

North Korea: The Telegraph reported, in paraphrase, that six million North Koreans might be starving, but the children of the elite can order take-out from McDonalds in China, using Air Koryo -- the national airlines -- to make the deliveries to their homes.

McDonald's has no franchises in North Korea, but has 850 in China. North Korea has no banking relationship, such as credit cards, with the United States. American dollars buy junk food in China for the families of the senior party members and have it delivered.

According to The Telegraph report, Kim Chong-il indulges this and other extravagances as bribes in return for support for his third son as the next leader of North Korea. Some North Koreans consider Chinese-made McDonald's hamburgers to be delicacies.

This could be funny if it wasn't so evil.

I'm sure it's just a coincidence

2011-07-15T18:25:00.002-04:00

Revealing Harry Potter Ad Placement

The failure of the establishment

2011-07-15T18:07:00.001-04:00

Walter Russell Mead does it again (from his blog on The American Interest):

I don’t want to make this a habit, and I suspect he doesn’t either, but Paul Krugman and I are once again in (very) partial agreement. We both think the American elite has intellectually and morally lost its way, and we agree that the problems our country faces today have more to do with elite breakdown than popular stupidity.
***
That is not what the elite thinks, by and large. To listen to many bien pensant American intellectuals and above-the-salt journalists, America faces a shocking problem today: the cluelessness, greed, arrogance and bigotry of the American public. American elites are genuinely and sincerely convinced that the American masses don’t understand the world, don’t realize that American exceptionalism is a mental disease, want infinite government benefits while paying zero tax, and cling to their Bibles and their guns despite all the peer reviewed social science literature that demonstrates the danger and the worthlessness of both.
***
[In reality] The American people are less prejudiced, more globally aware and more willing to meet other cultures and societies halfway than ever before. Minorities today are better protected in law and more fairly treated by the public than ever in our history. No previous generation has been as determined to give women a fair chance in life, or to attack the foul legacy of racism. The American people have never been as religiously tolerant as they are today, as concerned about the environment, or more willing to make sacrifices around the world to promote the peace and well being of humanity as a whole.

By contrast, we have never had an Establishment that was so ill-equipped to lead. It is the Establishment, not the people, that is falling down on the job.
Here in the early years of the twenty-first century, the American elite is a walking disaster and is in every way less capable than its predecessors. It is less in touch with American history and culture, less personally honest, less productive, less forward looking, less effective at and less committed to child rearing, less freedom loving, less sacrificially patriotic and less entrepreneurial than predecessor generations. Its sense of entitlement and snobbery is greater than at any time since the American Revolution; its addiction to privilege is greater than during the Gilded Age and its ability to raise its young to be productive and courageous leaders of society has largely collapsed.

It's worth a full read.

I really hope this works

2011-07-15T17:45:00.001-04:00

From The Guardian

Iceland is crowdsourcing its new constitution.

In creating the new document, the council has been posting draft clauses on its website every week since the project launched in April. The public can comment underneath or join a discussion on the council's Facebook page.
The council also has a Twitter account, a YouTube page where interviews with its members are regularly posted, and a Flickr account containing pictures of the 25 members at work, all intended to maximise interaction with citizens.
Meetings of the council are open to the public and streamed live on to the website and Facebook page. The latter has more than 1,300 likes in a country of 320,000 people.
The crowdsourcing follows a national forum last year where 950 randomly selected people spent a day discussing the constitution. If the committee has its way the draft bill, due to be ready at the end of July, will be put to a referendum without any changes imposed by parliament – so it will genuinely be a document by the people, for the people.

Comment: Randomly-selected councils. Meetings open to the public. All the usual social media sites. This could prove to be very interesting.

Have you wondered what America's real space program looks like?

2011-07-15T16:55:00.001-04:00

Gallery: America’s Secret Space Arsenal | Danger Room | Wired.com

I'm especially interested in the video of NOSS in orbit. It explains a lot of anomalous "UFO" sightings and it illustrates our natural tendency to "fill in the blanks" when we don't have much data.

The party's over

2011-07-15T16:39:00.001-04:00

Theories are great, but data are better

2011-07-15T10:58:00.001-04:00

Pakistan's Middle Class Extremists | Foreign Affairs

A question I'd like to see answered

2011-07-14T12:38:00.001-04:00

From Danger Room:

In a letter that Sens. Mark Udall of Colorado and Ron Wyden of Oregon will send later on Thursday, obtained by Danger Room, the senators ask Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, “Do government agencies have the authority to collect the geolocation information of American citizens for intelligence purposes?”

Both senators are members of the panel overseeing the 16 intelligence agencies. In May, they sounded warnings that the Obama administration was secretly reinterpreting the Patriot Act to allow a broader amount of domestic surveillance than it had publicly disclosed.
“[R]ecent advances in geolocation technology have made it increasingly easy to secretly track the movements and whereabouts of individual Americans on an ongoing, 24/7 basis,” they write. “Law enforcement agencies have relied on a variety of different methods to conduct this sort of electronic surveillance, including the acquisition of cell phone mobility data from communications companies as well as the use of tracking devices covertly installed by the law enforcement agencies themselves.”
Geolocation is a particular interest of Wyden’s. Technically, there are few obstacles to clandestine geodata collection, since most mobile phones feature built-in GPS. So along with a House Republican, Jason Chaffetz, Wyden introduced a bill that would require warrants for law enforcement to collect geodata. As our sister blog Threat Level has reported, a patchwork of inconsistent recent court rulings has yet to resolve whether geolocation data is protected by the Fourth Amendment.

What do all the rest of you think? As a practical matter, can we say there is a reasonable expectation of privacy?

Hell--can we assume a reasonable expectation of privacy anywhere?

The Dude abides

2011-07-13T16:57:00.001-04:00

Scholars and The Big Lebowski

"A bowling alley. A severed toe sporting a neatly polished nail. An aging hippie and his best friend, a Vietnam War veteran with a hair-trigger temper.

If those images don’t add up to anything for you, feel free to flip the page. If they do, it means you’re familiar — perhaps intimately so — with one of the most analyzed, deconstructed and eclectically interpreted films of recent decades: The Big Lebowski.

Joel and Ethan Coen‘s subversive comedy, in which a slovenly slacker (Jeff Bridges) in modern-day L.A. gets caught up in a convoluted kidnapping case, was neither a critical nor a popular success when it was released in 1998. But it gradually became a cult classic, attracting a large, committed group of followers — including more than a few academics.

In anticipation of the 10th annual Lebowski Fest, a gathering of fans taking place July 15 and 16 in Louisville, Ky., we decided to pour ourselves a white Russian and peruse some of the scholarly papers the film has inspired. Probably by design, it’s impossible to get a firm handle on The Big Lebowski, but there’s value in tracing its disparate thematic threads and discovering the patterns they create. Think of it as research that ties the room together."

I wonder if Mark knows about this?

It's more than the great firewall

2011-07-13T16:42:00.001-04:00

BBC News - China: 1.3 million websites shut in 2010:

The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences said there were were 41% fewer websites at the end of 2010 than a year earlier.
Chinese officials have tightened regulations on the internet in recent years, and they launched a crackdown on pornography websites in 2009.
The academy's researcher said there was no link, insisting China had a 'high level of freedom of online speech'.
Liu Ruisheng said that despite the declining number of sites, the number of web pages had risen to 60 billion during 2010 - a 79% increase on the previous year.

Comment: It should be interesting to see how well this works. There's lot of talent in China--and much of it looks for ways around official censorship.

A victory for the flying spaghetti monster

2011-07-13T16:37:00.001-04:00

BBC News - Austrian driver's religious headgear strains credulity

I wonder how much trouble it would be to do this with my PA driver's license?

Holy sh#!t

2011-07-12T14:46:00.001-04:00

From Danger Room: 100 Firefights, Three Weeks: Inside Afghanistan’s Most Insane Fight: "

Editor’s note: These Marines’ tour was one of the most brutal of the entire war. In its first three weeks in Afghanistan’s Sangin district, the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines got into more than 100 firefights, and sustained 62 casualties. The insurgents managed to negate the Marines’ night-vision gear, and rendered their traditional close-combat tactics useless. Things got so bad, the 3/5’s superior officers even suggested pulling their troops back.
That didn’t happen. Instead, the 3/5 went after the militants, hard. They went on the offensive constantly. They leveled booby-trapped compounds without apology. They didn’t bother with school-building until the insurgents were back on their heels. Nor did they mess with the poppy growers; the Marines had more than their fair share of enemies.

When the 3/5 came home, they told counterinsurgency historian Mark Moyar all about their deeply unconventional approach to what was already an unconventional war. An excerpt from Moyar’s 74-page after action report follows.
——
On Oct. 13, the day 3/5 took control of Sangin, the first Marine patrol to leave the wire came under fire 150 feet from the perimeter. One member of this patrol was shot dead. Within the next four days, another eight Marines died.
The extent of the resistance encountered in Sangin surprised many of the Marines. It was stronger than any Taliban resistance that Marines had witnessed previously in Afghanistan. During prior major Marine operations in Helmand, the insurgents had fought toe-to-toe for a few days and then relied primarily on IEDs [improvised explosive devices] and small hit-and-run ambushes. The insurgents in Sangin kept attacking in large numbers, and regrouped for counter-attacks after the initial volleys instead of dispersing.
To maintain morale, officers and NCOs kept their Marines focused on the need to defeat the enemy and avenge the fallen, and kept them active so that they did not have time to mope. “You really can’t prepare a Marine to lose his good buddy or see another one of his buddies with both his legs blown off,” said Captain Chris Esrey, commander of India company. “The best way to overcome that is to get right back out on a patrol the next day because it doesn’t happen every time you go out.”

Comment: "War is Hell" doesn't cover the half of it. These people do the impossible. I can't help but wonder, though--in the long run, was it worth it?

Karzai’s Brother Dies A Gangster’s Death in Kandahar

2011-07-12T14:40:00.000-04:00

From Danger Room

Karzai’s Brother Dies A Gangster’s Death in Kandahar:

Since Ahmed Wali Karzai lived like the Tony Montana of Afghanistan, it almost seems inevitable that half-brother of the Afghan president died the way he did.
The man known by the U.S. military as AWK was gunned down in his Kandahar home by one of his own bodyguards, Sardar Mohammad, on Tuesday morning. Very conveniently, other members of the AWK guard force killed Mohammad.
The Taliban are claiming credit for the assassination. But AWK, who ran the Kandahar provincial council, had no shortage of enemies. Deep breath: there’s probably going to be a power struggle in Kandahar now.
AWK was a classic warlord. More powerful than the province’s governor, he had connections to the drug trade, fueled by American largesse, and controlled a fearsome private militia. The U.S. military, alarmed that AWK’s corruption made the Taliban’s argument for it, thought him so dangerous to the war effort that it considered putting him on its “kill or capture” list. Officials at the U.S. embassy in Kabul debated prosecuting him. But AWK reportedly was the CIA’s man in Kandahar — which blunted U.S. moves against him and exposed the incoherence of American anti-corruption strategy.
But AWK also maintained a large patronage network that kept him in power. Last month, Matthieu Aikins of Harper’s reported that a “who’s who of pro-government figures” convened to discuss a push to install him as Kandahar’s governor. AWK paid for the event.
Follow Aikins’ tweets for granular English-language information on the aftermath. But a struggle to fill the void left by AWK’s death may already be underway. Aikins guesses that the governor, an import from British Columbia propped up by AWK, is looking for the exits. Possible successors to AWK include the similarly corrupt (and violent) Gul Agha Shirzai, now the governor of Nangahar; and police chief Abdul Raziq, whom Aikins once described as ”a ruthless, charismatic figure, a man who brooked no opposition to his will.”
The U.S. propped up AWK for years on the promise that the stability of a strongman trumped any concerns about corruption. Now that “stability” is gone — right as insurgent attacks have barely leveled off in Afghanistan, the Taliban seek to retake Kandahar, and the U.S. hopes to hold it as some of them start to come home.

Comment: I'm glad to see him go, but sad to see what's coming. When will we learn not to put faith in strongmen?

Is this for real?

2011-07-12T14:33:00.000-04:00

From the Small Wars Journal:

SFA in Africa, Training Video # 1

The war for the Planet of the Apes has begun?

Playing Chicken

2011-07-11T12:53:00.000-04:00

From The Economist:

"This newspaper has a strong dislike of big government; we have long argued that the main way to right America’s finances is through spending cuts. But you cannot get there without any tax rises. In Britain, for instance, the coalition government aims to tame its deficit with a 3:1 ratio of cuts to hikes. America’s tax take is at its lowest level for decades: even Ronald Reagan raised taxes when he needed to do so.

And the closer you look, the more unprincipled the Republicans look. Earlier this year House Republicans produced a report noting that an 85%-15% split between spending cuts and tax rises was the average for successful fiscal consolidations, according to historical evidence. The White House is offering an 83%-17% split (hardly a huge distance) and a promise that none of the revenue increase will come from higher marginal rates, only from eliminating loopholes. If the Republicans were real tax reformers, they would seize this offer.

Both parties have in recent months been guilty of fiscal recklessness. Right now, though, the blame falls clearly on the Republicans. Independent voters should take note."

Our "friends" in Pakistan

2011-07-08T18:31:00.000-04:00

From the July 7th Nightwatch:

Pakistan-North Korea: Special comment. The international news media have reported that Pakistan provided North Korea the technology and sample centrifuges for making Highly Enriched Uranium for nuclear weapons.

The source of the revelation is a newly disclosed letter sent in 1998 from a senior North Korean official to Abdul Qader Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear weapons program. The letter contains details of bribes or payoffs to then Chief of Army Staff General Jehangir Karamat and another general. It was signed by North Korean National Defense Commission member Chon Pyong Ho. The letter mentions missile components sent to Pakistan and the dispatch of a new emissary who has been in Egypt, Libya, Syria and Iran - all conventional weapons or missile clients of North Korea.Pakistani officials have charged the letter is a forgery by A.Q. Khan so as to distribute blame for his conviction for selling strategic secrets. Khan is under house arrest, but always swore he acted under orders from the highest authorities. In 1998, those would have been General Karamat and then Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. Those luminaries always claimed Khan acted on his own in selling Pakistan's strategic nuclear secrets to North Korea.US intelligence people have said the letter looks authentic, according to press reports. And this time they have it right. The transaction in 1998 involved strategic assets which North Korea and Pakistan guard jealously. Pakistan desperately needed a reliable nuclear weapons delivery system after India tested its nuclear weapons in 1998. Pakistan had tested its nuclear technology in response. The date of the letter is July 1998.North Korea had plutonium for fissile material, but was in the market for uranium enrichment technology. North Korea had the NoDong medium range ballistic missile as a delivery system, a reliable weapons carrier, to trade for enrichment technology. Most nuclear weapons states have both plutonium and highly enriched uranium processes for producing fissile material.The individuals mentioned in the letter include people who must be involved in such a transaction, namely General Karamat and Chon. Chon Pyong Ho was the chief of the Second Economic Committee, the North Korean name for the group that supervises the military industrial complex - all the plants that make ballistic missiles, nuclear weapons and all other military ordnance. He is a classmate of Kim Chong-il, who still chairs the National Defense Commission.

Karamat probably did not take a bribe as he claims. Any money from North Korea would have been diverted into Pakistan Army secret funds. Chon Pyong Ho's involvement indicates the highest level of the North Korean government was involved directly in the transaction. That raises a prima facie inference that Chon was dealing with his counterparts in Pakistan. RThe Chief of the Army Staff is the highest ranking military officer in Pakistan. A.Q. Khan was the project director and middleman.The facts are that the four prototype uranium enrichment centrifuges that the North obtained were made in Pakistan and supplied by A.Q. Khan, by his own admission. The Ghauri missiles in the Pakistan Army came from North Korea and are NoDongs.The obvious inference is that this was a high level arrangement authorized by both governments. This was not a simple swap because of the huge follow-on investments in land and equipment required to build Ghauri missile production and testing facilities and bases in Pakistan and to build a nuclear enrichment centrifuge cascade in North Korea. These were large-scael and expensive undertakings by both countries.In short, in 1998, Pakistan, a US friend, provided nuclear weapons technology to North Korea, an enemy with whom the US was and is still at war. The letter adds details about the physical exchange of strategic assets in 1998.

Pakistan-US: Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral. Mike Mullen said 7July that the murder of a Pakistani journalist was sanctioned by the Pakistani government. Mullen said he did not have reason to disabuse that the Pakistani government knew about the murder.

Comment: The journalist was Syed Saleem Shahzad who was murdered in May for reporting on infiltration of the Pakistan armed forces by anti-government Islamic militants. For Mullen and other US officials to make unconditional statements about Pakistani government culpability means that the evidence is conclusive.

The above two reports are studies in Pakistani democracy.

Sometimes it feels like we've made an alliance with Hitler in order to fight Mussolini.

Reconceptualizing security

2011-04-25T12:44:00.002-04:00

From the NATO Parliamentary Assembly--General Hans Klauman, former chairman of the North Atlantic military council, had some interesting comments:

“Globally, the struggle for water will be the primary source of conflict in the future, since at present 40% of mankind gets water from extraterritorial sources” said General Naumann, speaking to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly in Edinburgh. He also issued a warning on the impact of demographic shifts on geopolitical power structures. The shrinking, aging European population will put “tremendous pressure” on their societies, compounded by migration trends. These trends are in turn likely to intensify, partly as a result of the effects of climate change on poorer countries. General Naumann also predicted a decline of the Russian population to “perhaps less than 100 million”, and pointed out the strategic significance of the four million illegal Chinese immigrants living and working in the resource rich parts of Siberia.

“The twenty-first century will be an unsettled century” said the general, whose presentation went on to discuss cyberwar and other emerging threats. He supported the role of NATO on the world security stage, but said that the alliance “must be refashioned in accordance with a duly expanded concept of security”, to incorporate “all the instruments of crisis management, including, above all, non-military components, and which seeks cooperation with other organisations.”

I think he needs to distinguish between levels of causation when talking about resource wars. As for the expansion of the concept of security, he's right that it needs to be expanded, so long as we don't forget the difference between intended and unintended threats.

Here's something you don't see every day...

2011-04-15T16:32:00.001-04:00

Bretton Woods 2.0

2011-04-13T13:23:00.001-04:00

Dangerous television

2011-04-13T13:12:00.001-04:00

Chinese authorities are banning an increasingly popular genre of TV. It's time-travel drama, where th protagonist goes back in time, suffers culture shock, but eventually prevails and finds love. So what's the problem?

The New Yorker's Richard Brody suggests that what's making censors uncomfortable, is less what these dramas say about China's history, than what they imply about its present:
What the Chinese time-travel plots, as described above, have in common is the notion of escape: leaving contemporary, Communist-dominated China for the China of another era, one where, despite mores that are, in some ways, odd and outdated, love and happiness can be found. Time travel serves here as a dream of freedom from present-day strictures—or simply as a cry for freedom, from precisely this kind of idiotic and despotic regulation.

Bingo.

I'm not pissed off at all

2011-04-13T13:04:00.001-04:00

In fact, I think it is some of the most insightful writing about higher education I've read in years.

Fair warning: This article will piss off a lot of you.
I can say that with confidence because it’s about Peter Thiel. And Thiel – the PayPal co-founder, hedge fund manager and venture capitalist – not only has a special talent for making money, he has a special talent for making people furious.
Some people are contrarian for the sake of getting headlines or outsmarting the markets. For Thiel, it’s simply how he views the world. Of course a side benefit for the natural contrarian is it frequently leads to things like headlines and money.
Consider the 2000 Nasdaq crash. Thiel was one of the few who saw in coming. There’s a famous story about PayPal’s March 2000 venture capital round. The offer was “only” at a $500 million-or-so valuation. Nearly everyone on the board and the management team balked, except Thiel who calmly told the room that this was a bubble at its peak, and the company needed to take every dime it could right now. That’s how close PayPal came to being dot com roadkill a la WebVan or Pets.com.
And after the crash, Thiel insisted there hadn’t really been a crash: He argued the equity bubble had simply shifted onto the housing market. Thiel was so convinced of this thesis that until recently, he refused to buy property, despite his soaring personal net worth. And, again, he was right.
So Friday, as I sat with Thiel in his San Francisco home that he finally owns, I was curious what he thinks of the current Web frenzy. Not surprisingly, another Internet bubble seemed the farthest thing from his mind. But, he argued, America is under the spell of a bubble of a very different kind. Is it an emerging markets bubble? You could argue that, Thiel says, but he also notes that with half of the world’s population surging to modernity, it’s hard to argue the emerging world is overvalued.
Instead, for Thiel, the bubble that has taken the place of housing is the higher education bubble. “A true bubble is when something is overvalued and intensely believed,” he says. “Education may be the only thing people still believe in in the United States. To question education is really dangerous. It is the absolute taboo. It’s like telling the world there’s no Santa Claus.”
Like the housing bubble, the education bubble is about security and insurance against the future. Both whisper a seductive promise into the ears of worried Americans: Do this and you will be safe. The excesses of both were always excused by a core national belief that no matter what happens in the world, these were the best investments you could make. Housing prices would always go up, and you will always make more money if you are college educated.
Like any good bubble, this belief– while rooted in truth– gets pushed to unhealthy levels. Thiel talks about consumption masquerading as investment during the housing bubble, as people would take out speculative interest-only loans to get a bigger house with a pool and tell themselves they were being frugal and saving for retirement. Similarly, the idea that attending Harvard is all about learning? Yeah. No one pays a quarter of a million dollars just to read Chaucer. The implicit promise is that you work hard to get there, and then you are set for life. It can lead to an unhealthy sense of entitlement. “It’s what you’ve been told all your life, and it’s how schools rationalize a quarter of a million dollars in debt,” Thiel says.
Thiel isn’t totally alone in the first part of his education bubble assertion. It used to be a given that a college education was always worth the investment– even if you had to take out student loans to get one. But over the last year, as unemployment hovers around double digits, the cost of universities soars and kids graduate and move back home with their parents, the once-heretical question of whether education is worth the exorbitant price has started to be re-examined even by the most hard-core members of American intelligensia.
Making matters worse was a 2005 President George W. Bush decree that student loan debt is the one thing you can’t wriggle away from by declaring personal bankruptcy, says Thiel. “It’s actually worse than a bad mortgage,” he says. “You have to get rid of the future you wanted to pay off all the debt from the fancy school that was supposed to give you that future.”
But Thiel’s issues with education run even deeper. He thinks it’s fundamentally wrong for a society to pin people’s best hope for a better life on something that is by definition exclusionary. “If Harvard were really the best education, if it makes that much of a difference, why not franchise it so more people can attend? Why not create 100 Harvard affiliates?” he says. “It’s something about the scarcity and the status. In education your value depends on other people failing. Whenever Darwinism is invoked it’s usually a justification for doing something mean. It’s a way to ignore that people are falling through the cracks, because you pretend that if they could just go to Harvard, they’d be fine. Maybe that’s not true.”

Then again, I've always focued on places that put learning above status-signals.

Watch Gaza

2011-04-06T09:56:00.001-04:00

NightWatch usually gets mthe indicators right, and provides this warning on Gaza:

Israel-Palestine: Israel's Minister of Public Security Yitzhak Aharonovitch said Israel and Gaza are on the verge of a conflict akin to Operation Cast Lead -- the December 2008 Israeli punitive campaign in the Gaza Strip, according to an Israeli radio report. Aharonovitch warned residents of southern Israel to expect more rocket attacks from Gaza.

Comment: Aharonovitch's statement is the second in a week that warns Israelis to expect a large military operation in the Gaza Strip. The timing remains undisclosed, but the developing warning pattern suggests soon. At least one or two more warnings that contain more details should follow in shorter intervals, if an operation is planned. The Israeli civilians in southern Israel require advance notice to make civil defense preparations and the government always provides it, as it is doing now.

The "fun" about the middle east these days is everything happening at once.

Battling over crumbs

2011-04-05T14:12:00.001-04:00

Progress in intelligence

2011-04-04T13:54:00.000-04:00

For make benefit glorious nation of Kazakhstan

2011-04-04T12:24:00.001-04:00

Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev has won an crushing election victory, saying he now has "carte blanche" to continue national reform.

The country's Central Election Commission said he had won 95.5% of votes, based on partial results.

Mr Nazarbayev, 70, told supporters he would "continue the course of economic, political and social reforms".

"When the strong fight the weak the strong become weak."

2011-03-28T13:54:00.001-04:00

That's what Martin van Crevald has said. Nietzsche said it better:

"When you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back at you."

Anyone want to buy an aircraft carrier?

2011-03-28T13:36:00.001-04:00

The British have one to sell, and they are putting it on a "military ebay."

The Ark Royal

This speaks to me

2011-03-24T10:50:00.001-04:00

Part of a much larger essay on zenpundit.com, quoting, of all people, Edward Said:

When you think about it, when you think about Jew and Palestinian not separately, but as part of a symphony, there is something magnificently imposing about it. A very rich, also very tragic, also in many ways desperate history of extremes — opposites in the Hegelian sense — that is yet to receive its due. So what you are faced with is a kind of sublime grandeur of a series of tragedies, of losses, of sacrifices, of pain that would take the brain of a Bach to figure out. It would require the imagination of someone like Edmund Burke to fathom.

[Said, Power, Politics and Culture, p. 447.]

I can't do it justice in this post. The whole thing is worth a look.

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