The Yank Abroad

With central bankers like these ...

2010-11-10T15:01:00.001Z

I was just listening to BBC’s Radio 4 interviewing Mervyn King, the UK’s central banker. I felt like I was listening to Pravda’s Radio Propaganda. There are three options: he was lying, he’s a moron, or he was answering a different question.

The Bank of England is predicting continued economic growth in the UK. Given the prediction of growth — King claimed that the UK has had growth of 4% in the last 2 quarters in-line with the rest of the world — and the recent recession, he said there are both strong inflationary and deflationary pressures at play, making it impossible to know which will dominate. He added that he was extremely concerned about the level of UK debt and approved the Conservatives efforts to cut the deficit.

This is the man in charge of the UK’s central bank! His analysis and implied advice in the situation is like having an alligator lunge out of the water at you and having Mervyn say, well, you should jog out of the way, but you don’t want to go too fast and tire yourself out and don’t worry, snapping turtles only run backwards.

Firstly, the UK’s economic growth has gone from -6% last year to about 3% in the 3rd quarter. It has not been 4% for the past 2 quarters. Historically, since the end of WWII, UK GDP growth has been 1.5% to 2.5% a year in line with the rest of Western Europe and North America, so 4% growth would be reason for dancing in the streets. In fact, it’s so good that deficits would mean nothing. The UK could grow its way out of the budget deficit in a few years. This is exactly what the US did to get rid of Regan’s massive deficit, growth made possible by the IT revolution.

Secondly, it appears that growth is slowing and may well start to decline again. Frankly, it is disingenuous at best and stupid at worst to predict growth when there a million job losses coming as a result of Tory policies and what should be the government-owned banks are still refusing to loan the government’s money to small and medium sized companies that could start expanding and hire some of the newly unemployed. In essence, the Tories by axing jobs and not forcing banks to operate as banks are turning the gainfully employed into the unemployable. Anecdotally, since I’m now a comedian and run a comedy club, I’ve noticed that business is down generally. People don’t seem to be going out as much as they did last year, back when, according to Mervy, they had less money. I took a look at pub trade figures and they too show a fall in sales across the country.

Thirdly, Conservative efforts to cut the deficit will have the perverse effect of slowing economic growth, which in turn lowers tax revenues. They are following the policies enacted by Ireland, which has led the Irish Republic over the precipice into the worst economic quagmire in the developed world. Someone should drum into the Conservatives collectively thick head that Ireland should be a cautionary tale, not a roadmap.

Fourthly, the only people that seem to be doing well out of the recent economic growth are banks who have taken a windfall of government money, used some of it to pay themselves and the rest to continue the risky practices that got us into this mess in the first place. As far as I can tell, if Merv isn’t lying or an idiot, he was only talking about bankers in the first place.

Finally, I’ll give Merv a little hint. There is both inflation and deflation. For the very wealthy who are in a windfall situation, there are inflationary pressures. For all of the schmucks like me that have to work for a living, there is deflation, except where government regulates, like public transport, taxes and housing. For the real economy of people making things that working people want to buy, there is deflation as working men and women have less money.

I’m guessing the question Mr King was answering was “What would be the most ridiculous lying, stupid thing for the UK’s central banker to say right now?”. Great answer Merv, great answer…

In The News

2008-01-03T16:32:00.000Z

In yesterday’s news:

Republican nomination hopefuls Mitt Romney, the evolution-denying Mormon, and Mike Huckabee, the evolution-denying evangelical, are the two front runners for the US Republican Party nomination in Iowa. While both claim evolution is a fiction perpetuated by the Devil, they both refused to have last year’s flu jab this year because the influenza virus has mutated.

Meanwhile, Saskatchewan’s economy is booming thanks to surging exports of potash, oil and uranium. That’s right folks, Saskatchewan is just letting everyone know that North America has it’s own Siberia.

In Drugs policy, Richard Brunstrom, the chief constable of North Wales, said that the drug ecstasy is safer than aspirin and should be legalised along with heroin and cocaine. Government ministers disagreed, saying that drug use should be punished in all cases except those involving Labour Party soirees or their children.

Boom-boom time for emergency services, emergency services officials complained that they were four times busier on New Year’s Eve than they are on a normal night. They also complained that frostbite is up in winter, sunburn is up in summer and the Pope has a higher than average risk of injury from incense inhalation.

Also, Paul McCartney had angioplasty to improve blood flow to his heart, which had atrophied during his recent acrimonious divorce from Heather Mills McCartney. Mr McCartney apparently feels there is still room for a few more silly love songs.

Overseas, two British expats in Algeria were sacked for “sheep violation” of animals destined for sacrifice on the Muslim holy day of Eid. They committed the acts after being asked what they did for fun in their native Wales. “Good thing we didn’t name any of the sheep Mohamed,” said one of the men.

In today’s news:

On the corporate kindness front, UK supermarket chain Tesco was awarded the Christmas Scrooge award for sacking Alan Rowbothan from his £6/hour job for picking 20p off the floor and Nicola Fryer because her 13-year-old daughter tried to use her 10% staff discount card to buy a 20p malt loaf. Also, employees of a Brighton Tesco were being docked 80% of their Christmas bonus for wearing gloves and jumpers because the store where they work had become uncomfortably cold. Meanwhile, the top Tesco executives pocketed £26 million in Christmas bonuses, more than any other FTSE 100 company, proving that “receiving is better than giving” and that “every little helps”.

In US politics, the dash for the Republican Party nomination is heating up. John McCain is being held back because he has shown himself to be the most reasonable candidate, a major departure from his standing as a right-wing crazy in the 1990s. But McCain hasn’t changed, it’s just the rest of the Republican candidates that are in cuckoo land. Mitt Romney is basically a Mormon version of George W Bush. Rudy Giuliani is an angry man with an uncommon drive. He wants to replace Saudi oil with Midwest coal to screw the Saudis and the planet; he wants to continue to torture people to screw what’s left of the US’ reputation for human rights; he wants invade Iran to screw the Middle East, and he wants to keep health insurance unaffordable for many American to screw the poor. Mike Huckabee is basically the same, except he is a Bible thumper who doesn’t believe in evolution but does believe in invading Pakistan.

Back in the UK, more Britons are addicted to fast food than even Americans. 45% of Britons said they “like the taste of junk food too much to give it up”, topping the 44% of Americans who agreed. While London may have the Michelin stars, the average Brit is trying to look like the Michelin Man.

On the transport front, the government wants to double the number of passengers using rail by 2030. To help realise that vision, rail companies have hiked fares by as much as 14.5% to ring in the New Year. This comes on top of a 7.3% rise on 2007, an 8.8% jump in 2006, and a 7.2% gouge in 2005. By 2030, rail fares will be three times what they are today, so presumably the government expects higher rail ridership to come from the bling factor: “I is so rich I can ride the train”, or the snob appeal, which the same, only more grammatical.

The Parking Racket

2007-12-14T23:48:00.000Z

Every so often there is a story in the paper that makes you go, “WHAT?! Surely not.” A man, Jamie Thomson, went to a McDonald’s near Gatwick, ordered a burger, chips, coke, doughnut and coffee and then had the temerity to sit in the parking lot to eat them over the course of an hour. That was 15 minutes beyond the time limit. For that crime he now owes £213 and has been contacted by a debt collection agency and threatened with court action. It has been fairly well covered, to read further see here.

The background to this is that a couple of years ago the government in the UK decided to give parking enforcement over to the private sector, you know, since it has worked so well for public transport.

McDonald’s gave a contract to a company, Civil Enforcement, to police 40-odd parking lots against people who park too long. McDonald’s says that they do not profit from the fine. Strictly speaking, that is true. They profit from their contract with Civil Enforcement who pays McDonald’s to go motorist hunting, sorry, I mean enforce the regulations in their lots.

According to Civil Enforcement, they take photos of licence plates and then track the people with the help of the DVLA because it is “less confrontational than clamping and towing”. Well, no shit. I imagine that most people would drive away if someone came up to the car with a clamp or a tow truck. Getting people to leave may have been the original goal of McDonald’s giving the hunting licence, excuse me, parking enforcement contract, to CE, but now it’s just a way of fleecing people. The phrase highway robbery comes to mind.

The government is in effect subsidising Civil Enforcement because the company depends on the publicly funded courts and the DVLA database to extort, sorry, I mean, recover their fines from people who don’t just pay right away like sheep to the slaughter, sorry, I mean like responsible citizens.

It’s a nice racket. Since the UK doesn’t have anti-racketeering laws of any real meaning, it’s a pretty safe business too.

Letter to Royal Mail

2007-12-08T00:02:00.000Z

Since moving to the UK eight years ago, I am every so often reminded that the UK is somewhat of a Second-World country. The mail is a case in point. Below is me going postal.

"Dear Sirs,

"The incident dates are every time I have received a package via Royal Mail since I moved to this address in July 2006.
"The most recent incident is particularly galling because the package contained perishables. It was supposed to be delivered Friday, 7 December 2007. There were two of us at home when the 'Sorry, you were out' notice was pushed through the letter slot. I am convinced that the delivery officer never had any intention of trying to deliver the package as this is part of an ongoing problem.
"Of course the telephone number on the notice doesn't allow the caller to actually talk to anyone and refers them to the website. Luckily I do have internet access. In the past the website has been under construction. Today it was working, at last. But it didn't give the one option I needed, which was to redeliver the package on Saturday. Monday was the only option for getting a redelivery or picking up the item in person from the delivery office which is over a mile away. Either way, the perishable goods will have perished by then.
"As I mentioned, this is not a one-off, but rather part of an ongoing pattern. The delivery officer, whose name I do not know, never, ever delivers packages. She delivers 'Sorry, you were out' notices. As I work from home, I am in during the postal deliveries. I have watched the notices come through the letter box. I have asked the delivery officer about them but she claims that it couldn't have been her delivering the notice and that it must have been someone else despite the fact that I had just caught her pushing one through the letter slot. Additionally, if she had brought the packages, she could have left them with either of my neighbours, both of whom I know and are home during postal deliveries.
"The simple fact is that she does not deliver packages, ever. My guess is that she doesn't like carrying them and never gets called on it since most people are not home during delivery hours.
The result is that whenever I am sent a package I have to wait two days and then take at least an hour out of my day to go pick up the package, since the delivery office is over a mile away.
Please prove the delivery officer wrong by actually doing something. Last time I caught her putting one of the 'Sorry, you were out' notices through my letter slot, she told me, 'Go ahead and complain. They won't do anything. They never do.'

"Sincerely,

"David Mulholland"

Iraq and Afghanistan to Cost US $2.4 Trillion

2007-10-26T14:55:00.000+01:00

Wow, was I ever wrong! Back in early 2003 when I was with Jane’s Defence Weekly, I estimated that the cost of a war with Iraq would cost $200 billion-$220 billion over five years. At the time the Bush administration was saying it would cost $50 billion in total. I got a lot of grief from some Bush apparatchiks for my estimate. Turns out I low-balled the number by quite a bit. So far Afghanistan and Iraq have cost $604 billion and the non-partisan US Congressional Budget Office estimates that the total cost through 2017 to be $2.4 trillion. So the Bush administration’s initial estimate was off by a factor of 48. That's right, the Bushies' war cost estimate was 2.1% of the real estimated cost.

For that same amount of money we could have put a colony on Mars! Not only would that have had the effect of unifying people with a new frontier, but the spin-off technologies would have probably led to whole new industries and an economic boom.

The downside would have been that Halliburton wouldn’t have gone from being the number 17^th largest contractor to the US Department of Defense to the 7^th and Cheney’s stock options wouldn’t be worth as much.

Kate McCann Cries — What Do You Expect? Glee?

2007-10-25T13:06:00.000+01:00

Kate McCann is in the paper today because she broke down in a television interview. I’m not sure I see what the news is except that she’s upset about the loss of her daughter, Madeleine. Well, of course she is. Not even the Portuguese police think she’s happy about her daughter being dead or missing.

On Monday it was headline news in one of the free London papers that Kate wants to go into childcare and quit being a GP. I think most people can agree that going into childcare is preferable to 10 years in a Portuguese jail. But I fail to see the news value. Whether her daughter was kidnapped or Kate and Gerry McCann accidentally killed their daughter, it has got to be a fairly traumatic event. My only question is would you trust her with your children? You’d have two-thirds chance of getting them back.

My big question is why is Kate in the news so much? Is it because she is a yummy mummy? Gerry, her husband, is not in the news nearly as much, despite the fact that he is an anaesthesiologist, which makes him a more likely suspect in an accidental overdosing of Madeleine, and he was the one who found Maddy missing.

This news about Kate looking to change jobs and crying seems to be a way of saying that she’s innocent of killing her kid. But it doesn’t. What probably happened was that Kate, a GP, and Gerry, an anaesthesiologist, got in the habit of dosing their kids so that they’ll sleep through the night. Probably they accidentally doubled the dose, by each of them giving Madeleine a dose, or they gave her more than usual to sleep through the night, or she reacted to the drug differently than in the past. Then, when Gerry went to check on the kids during dinner, he found Madeleine dead and panicked and hid the body. Indeed, he might even have disposed of the body and told Kate that Madeleine was missing. The point is that the focus should really be on him. But he’s just a bloke. She’s a hottie in grief. That makes better news somehow, especially in the Sun and Daily Mail.

This all raises an interesting question about what should be done if they are guilty of accidentally killing Madeleine. If they are convicted they will lose their medical licences, go to jail, and their twins will go into foster care. If they are not convicted, they will continue to practice medicine, probably much more carefully than in the past, and really cherish their twins and raise them well. I would hazard that they have learned their lesson about drugging their children and won’t do it again, so they don’t pose a threat to society.

Legally, if they are found guilty, their and their children’s lives will be ruined without preventing future crimes. It will deprive the community of their hard-learned skills and two children of their parents. On the whole, I hope they are found innocent, although I don’t think they are.

Too Early to Tell About Afghanistan

2007-10-20T11:19:00.000+01:00

There is some pretty bad news coming out of Afghanistan. According to a report by Chatham House, an influential, non-partisan London-based think tank,

Afghanistan

is in a slow descent.

This comes on top of an already poor situation where Afghani President Hamid Karzai has called for talks with the Taliban’s leader Mullah Omar and been rebuffed. See AP article here. The International Herald Tribune has a nice analysis of the situation here.

Additionally, according to a journalist inside the country for the last year, the roads near the capital are becoming too dangerous to travel, see here.

Basically, we’ve been in Afghanistan for nearly six years, and the Taliban is still a potent force, still being run by Mullah Omar, and Osama bin Laden is still running around recruiting bearded nutters to blow themselves up to commit murder.

There is some good news, however. Pakistan has been fighting against the Taliban sympathisers in Waziristan, see here.

If the Taliban are actually stopped from crossing back and forth across the border, coalition forces might actually make some real progress against them. The Chatham House report notes that one of the chief problems fighting the Taliban has been their ability to hop across the border to safety where the coalition forces are not allowed to follow.

My hunch is that unless the coalition and Pakistan can crush the Taliban, really, not just as a temporary PR exercise (also known as “lying about it”), there is a disturbing chance that radical Islamists will wind up taking control of Pakistan itself. The attempted assassination of Benazir Bhutto is stunning in its scope, 133 dead and at least 400 injured. If you do a Google search for “Pakistan” and “bomb” the first 350 entries (that’s all I had patience for) are all of suicide bomb attacks within Pakistan, most of which were not heard about in the West. In other words, Pakistan is struggling over its future. And remember, they have nukes.

An Inconvenient Truth mostly gets it right

2007-10-15T13:51:00.000+01:00

In my previous post, I only covered three of the nine points that a UK judge ruled were incorrect in “An Incovenient Truth”. Just to be thorough, below are the other six points.

One, the judge said that the film claimed global warming was “shutting down the ocean conveyor”, or Gulf Stream current that brings warm water from the tropics up to Northern Europe. He ruled that that statement is incorrect the since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that recent research indicates that the ocean conveyor is likely to be more resilient than previously thought.

A couple of points on this, the first is that much of the research finding that the Gulf Stream may be more robust than previously thought came out after the film was shot. If the film makers had mentioned the conclusions of research that hadn’t been completed yet, I would be very interested in their stock market and horse race predictions as well.

Another point is that the ocean conveyor current is driven by a 0.4% difference in salinity of ocean surface water in the tropics and the North Atlantic. More evaporation in the tropics makes the water saltier. The concern originally grew because scientists noticed that the Greenland ice sheet, which sits next to that current, is melting faster than previous predictions estimated because those earlier models didn’t account for the greater heat absorption of melted water versus ice. Basically, ice being white reflects sunlight and melted water being darker absorbs more sunlight, creating a feed back loop that increases melting. This drops fresh water into the current reducing its salinity. If the current’s salinity drops to 0.0% difference, the conveyor stops and Northern Europe freezes. While the judge is correct in stating that the film’s statements are more frightening than IPCC’s findings, the magnitude of the disaster that would befall Northern Europe if the current did stop, make concern appropriate. Also, given the feed-back loop in Greenland, there is still a real possibility of run away melting of the ice sheet, which could well shut down the current.

Two, the judge said that the film’s claim that melting glaciers in west Antarctica or Greenland “in the near future” could cause sea levels to rise by “up to 20 feet” is “distinctly alarmist”. The judge conceded that melting of major glaciers would raise sea levels by this much, only that it would take place over millennia.

Well, maybe, we really don’t know. Some models predict that it will take millennia for major glaciers to melt, some don’t. What we do know is that Antarctic and Greenland melt is much faster than previously estimated and that there appears to be feed-back loops that may well speed melt rates. Indeed, many scientists now are worried that such melting will occur in the next century or two. So the whole ruling depends on the definitions of “up to 20 feet” and “in the near future”. The guidance notes that will now accompany the film should probably point out that “in the near future” should be “in the not-too-distant future”.

Three, the film says that coral reefs are bleaching all over the world because of global warming and other factors. The judge said that teasing out global warming from other factors such as over-fishing and pollution is difficult.

Well, duh. But the film doesn’t claim that global warming is solely responsible. A study released in August by researchers from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill found that Pacific coral reefs are dying faster than previously thought and that rising ocean temperatures due to global warming are one of the key factors. The judge was just plain wrong on this one.

Four, the film attributes Hurricane Katrina to global warming. The judge found that there was “insufficient evidence to show that”.

Well, yeah, sort of in a pedantic way. We know that global warming is raising ocean temperatures. Higher ocean temperatures create more and stronger storms. Katrina was a storm. The obvious conclusion is that global warming was partly responsible.

Five, the film said the disappearance of snow on Mount Kilimanjaro was due to human-induced climate change. The judge said that the scientific consensus was that that could not be established.

One point for the judge. The disappearance of snow, and 90% of the glaciers on Kilimanjaro appear to be caused by a lack of snow, which may have nothing to due with global warming.

Six, the film gave the drying up of Lake Chad as an example of global warming. The judge said, “It is apparently considered to be more likely to result from … population increase, over-grazing and regional climate variability”.

Give another point to the judge. The shrinking of Lake Chad is due to poor rainfall over the past 40 years or so and large irrigation projects that have diverted water from the lake. Gore was just wrong on this one.

If those nine points, of which only two were valid, is the best that opponents of the film could do, the rational conclusion is that the film pretty much hits the nail on the head. I’m sure those who try to deny global warming will use the court case to claim that the film is riddled with errors and that Gore has been proven in a court of law of bald-faced lying. Such a position is a conscious misinterpretation of the facts, in other words, a lie.

The Great Global Warming Conspiracy

2007-10-13T22:11:00.000+01:00

Conservative blogs have been decrying Al Gore’s winning the Nobel Peace Prize, claiming that he was completely wrong about global warming in his film An Inconvenient Truth.
Frankly, I just don’t understand the right-wing’s spittle-spewing rage over global warming. The argument that global warming isn’t happening, and if it is, it isn’t man’s fault and even if it is, doing anything about it would be too expensive, smacks of a desperate defence of an indefensible position, namely the God-given right to drive a vehicle the size and power of a World War Two tank (Sherman tank 5.84m long with 350hp-400hp versus Chevy Suburban 5.65m long with 310hp-366hp).
Denying global warming is right up there with obstinately claiming, contrary to evidence and common sense, that the Moon is made of green cheese. Repeating a lie doesn’t make it true. Temperature records show that the average temperature is increasing. We know that arctic regions and most glaciers are melting at record rates. We know that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, i.e. it stores heat. We know that CO2 is at the highest level in 650,000 years. And we know that we are pumping huge quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere (no brainer here, just add up petroleum and coal production).
The only things that are at all contested are the various computer models that try to predict exactly what will happen in the future. As with any model of a complex system, exact prediction is fiendishly difficult because it is very difficult to precisely account for all of the feed-back loops in a complex system. It’s like being in a car that is speeding at a 100mph towards a cliff and arguing that the impact won’t be so bad because we haven’t yet figured out precisely how much the increased friction of the gravel on the soft shoulder will slow the car.
Even if things aren’t quite as bad as the vast majority of the models predict the logic of Pascal’s wager comes into play. This is easiest to portray in a little chart:
Cost of Action:
Global Warming True: Cut Emissions = Huge Savings/Do Nothing = Huge Losses
Global Warning False: Cut Emissions = Minor Losses/Do Nothing = No Losses
Basically, the lowest risk course of action is to cut emissions, because if it is true, the costs of doing nothing are very high.
The right-wing blogs are also making much out of the British judge ruling that while Gore’s film is broadly correct, there are some errors. Looking at the errors, they are disputable and minor.
For instance, The film claimed that low-lying inhabited Pacific atolls "are being inundated because of anthropogenic global warming". The judge found that there was no evidence of any evacuation occurring. Apparently he decided to ignore Vanuatu and Tuvalu. Also, the Maldives are coming under increasing pressure and rising sea levels are inundating their crops and fresh water supplies.
Similarly, Gore also referred to a study showing that polar bears were being found that had drowned "swimming long distances to find the ice". The judge said: "The only scientific study that either side before me can find is one which indicates that four polar bears have recently been found drowned because of a storm". Well, yeah, but there is evidence that polar bears have significantly less fat reserves than they have in the past, indicating that they aren’t able to reach the ice and hunt. So maybe they aren’t drowning, just starving. If current melting trends continue, bears will not have enough fat reserves to reproduce by 2012. When that happens, say good bye to polar bears except in zoos. Also, there is strong evidence that melting ice was responsible for killing a great number of seal pups. Canada had to reduce the quota of their annual hunt because of the low numbers of survivors. Seal, incidentally, are polar bears main food source. The upshot is that Gore’s film was essentially accurate in portraying polar bears as under pressure due to the warming of the arctic.
Another point that the judge made was that the film showed two graphs, one plotting a rise in C02 and the other the rise in temperature over a period of 650,000 years. The two graphs showed a remarkable fit. Gore said "an exact fit". The judge said although scientists agreed there was a connection between temperature and CO2 levels, "the two graphs do not establish what Mr Gore asserts". Basically the judge was pointing out that correlation and causation are not the same and that Gore had failed to prove causation.
The judge, while technically correct, was being dumber than a bag full of hammers. We know that CO2 stores energy. We know that atmospheric CO2 concentrations correlate strongly with temperature rises. We know that CO2 levels are rising. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that increasing CO2 levels is a bad idea. I would like to do a little experiment with the judge to see if his reasoning is always so skeptical. My little experiment would be to show the judge data that being hit in the head with a hammer correlated strongly with head injuries. Then I’d like to take one of the hammers from the above mentioned bag and have someone throw the hammer at the judge’s head. If he ducks, clearly he doesn’t buy his own reasoning any more than I do.
The final point I’d like to make is that the Nobel Peace Prize is an appropriate award. Military professionals, although clearly not right-wing bloggers, are concerned about global warming.
The following generals and admirals have written a report entitled “National Security and the Threat of Climate Change”:
General Gordon R. Sullivan, former Chief of Staff, US Army
Admiral Frank “Skip” Bowman, former Director, Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program, former Deputy Administrator-Naval Reactors, National Nuclear Security Administration
Lieutenant General Lawrence P. Farrell Jr., former Deputy Chief of Staff for Plans and Programs, Headquarters, US Air Force
Vice Admiral Paul G. Gaffney II, former President of the National Defense University, former Chief of Naval Research and Commander of Navy Meteorology and Oceanography Command
General Paul J. Kern, former Commanding General US Army Material Command
Admiral T. Joseph Lopez, former Commander-in-Chief, US Naval Forces Europe and of Allied Forces, Southern Europe
Admiral Donald L. “Don” Pilling, former Vice Chief of Naval Operations
Admiral Joseph W. Prueher, former Command-in-Chief of the US Pacific Command and former US Ambassador to China
The following is the forward of their report:

To the reader,
During our decades of experience in the U.S. military, we have addressed many national security challenges, from containment and deterrence of the Soviet nuclear threat during the Cold War to terrorism and extremism in recent years.
Global climate change presents a new and very different type of national security challenge.
Over many months and meetings, we met with some of the world’s leading climate scientists, business leaders, and others studying climate change. We viewed their work through the lens of our military experience as warfighters, planners, and leaders. Our discussions have been lively, informative, and very sobering.
Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are greater now than at any time in the past 650,000 years, and average global temperature has continued a steady rise. This rise presents the prospect of significant climate change, and while uncertainty exists and debate continues regarding the science and future extent of projected climate changes, the trends are clear.
The nature and pace of climate changes being observed today and the consequences projected by the consensus scientific opinion are grave and pose equally grave implications for our national security. Moving beyond the arguments of cause and effect, it is important that the U.S. military begin planning to address these potentially devastating effects. The consequences of climate change can affect the organization, training, equipping, and planning of the military services. The U.S. military has a clear obligation to determine the potential impacts of climate change
on its ability to execute its missions in support of national security objectives.
Climate change can act as a threat multiplier for instability in some of the most volatile regions of the world, and it presents significant national security challenges for the United States. Accordingly, it is appropriate to start now to help mitigate the severity of some of these emergent challenges. The decision to act should be made soon in order to plan prudently for the nation’s security. The increasing risks from climate change should be addressed now because they will almost certainly get worse if we delay.

The rest of the report can be found at http://securityandclimate.cna.org/
Call me crazy, but I think they just might have an idea what they’re talking about.

Blame the Koran and the Clan

2007-10-11T15:16:00.000+01:00

Why is the Muslim world so backwards?
The 1.2 billion-1.3 billion people in the Muslim world, about 20% of the world’s population, have a smaller GDP than Germany, about 1.2% of the world’s population. The Muslim world boasts three of the world’s top 500 companies, on par with Finland, a country of 5 million or 0.08% of the world’s population, but is responsible for fewer international patents. In short, the people who believe that there is no God but Allah and Mohammed is His prophet are clearly fighting for the “Who Has the Most Shit Civilisation?” award. Currently, sub-Saharan Africa is winning, but Islam is making inroads through seduction and slaughter into some of the world’s most backwards areas, think Darfur.
The question remains, why is the Muslim world doing so badly?
My current theory is that the culture of family honour and the insistence on the divine perfection of the Koran are at the root of the problem.
Let’s start with the Koran. Throughout much of the Muslim world, many people believe that the Koran contains all the wisdom needed. Anyone who questions the Koran or the Prophet is strongly chastised. Much Islamic education consists of little more than memorisation of religious texts and practical interpretation, which is a Herculean task given the huge number of internal and external contradictions. See endnotes for examples.
The problem is that endless repetition of dogma doesn’t make it true, it just makes people brainwashed. On an individual level, if someone believes that God/Allah created the world and everything in it, that person is not going to make a good evolutionary biologist.
Similarly, if someone believes that the rules for a perfect social structure is contained in a book written by a semiliterate 7th century incestuous paedophile merchant from a cultural backwater of a collapsing empire who suffered from auditory hallucinations, they are not going to make particularly wise legislator.
If that weren’t bad enough, the authoritarian clan structure and obsession with honour create a situation where lying is rampant and independent thought is stifled.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali wrote in The Caged Virgin: “This [Muslim] cultural background is characterized by three important factors. First, an authoritarian mentality based on strict hierarchy; second, a patriarchal family structure, in which the woman has a reproductive function and is expected to obey men in the family; if she doesn’t she will disgrace the family. Third, all thoughts revolve around the group; the group always comes before the individual; social control is very strong; and the fierce protection of the group’s honor makes people obsessed with avoiding shame at all cost, with the result that doing so through lying or simply denying what has really happened becomes the norm.”
Honour, as a concept, is relatively weak in the West, but in the Muslim, especially Arab world, it is central. That honour can be marred by weakness or wrongdoing, especially by women not following cultural rules designed to subjugate women. The preservation of honour can include murder of one’s own family members, something that I, as a Westerner, put at the very tippy, tippy top of the list of barbaric, uncivilised and dishonourable acts.
It is worth noting that the concept of honour is strong in eastern Asia in countries such as China and Japan. However, the rules against consanguineous marriage and small family size largely offset the effects, as does the importance ascribed to education.
The cultural influence of preserving honour in Muslim culture is exacerbated by the size and structure of clans in the Muslim world, especially the Arabic Muslim world. In the West, the Catholic Church, in the Middle Ages, banned marriage within the family to seventh degree of consanguinity (i.e. a couple couldn’t share the same great-great-great-great-great grandparent). That subsequently dropped to four degrees of consanguinity (great-great grandparent). The Church did this partly out of Roman and German culture and law and partly for its own benefit. By splitting up clans, families were more likely to give their allegiance to the Church.
By contrast, the Arab Muslim world is largely still based on clans with a very high frequency of marriage within the clan. According to various studies, marriages between first or second cousins are thought to account for 60% of Saudi couples, 58% of Iraqis, 55% of Kuwaitis, 50% of Jordanians and 48% of UAE natives. One consequence of this is that congenital diseases are much higher than in the West. The other consequence is social. The clans grow large and powerful and the individual’s independence of thought and action is subsumed into the good of the clan.
That combination of preserving honour and intellectual stagnation make progress in the Muslim world nearly impossible, which is why most Muslim countries are at least partly stuck in a mediaeval mindset where faith, pride, ignorance and tyranny rule and any voices of reason are threatened with death.
Is it any surprise then that the West, with societies largely based on reason, evidence and scepticism are far ahead of the Muslim world?

ENDNOTES:
Example of an internal contradiction from the Authorized English Translation:
[10:90] We delivered the Children of Israel across the sea. Pharaoh and his troops pursued them, aggressively and sinfully. When drowning became a reality for him, he said, "I believe that there is no god except the One in whom the Children of Israel have believed; I am a submitter."
[10:91] "Too late! For you have rebelled already, and chose to be a transgressor.
[10:92] "Today, we will preserve your body [Pharaoh’s], to set you up as a lesson for future generations." Unfortunately, many people are totally oblivious to our signs.
Contrast that with:
[17:102] He [Moses] said, "You know full well that no one can manifest these except, obviously, the Lord of the heavens and the earth. I think that you, Pharaoh, are doomed."
[17:103] When he [the Pharaoh] pursued them, as he chased them out of the land, we drowned him, together with those who sided with him, all of them.

Example of an external contradiction:
[51:49] We created a pair (male and female) of everything, that you may take heed.
Clearly Mohammed didn’t know jack about God’s creatures such as bacteria, fungi, snails, earthworms, bdelloid rotifers, and many others. This begs the question, if the Koran is God/Allah’s inspired word, why did God/Allah get it wrong?

N.B. The Bible is no better. Like the Koran, it is full of internal and external contradictions. The difference is that there are very few if any Christians who threaten to kill people who question it.

Rumsfeld belongs at the Hoover Institute

2007-09-24T15:08:00.000+01:00

Students at Stanford University are protesting Donald Rumsfeld being made a visiting fellow at the university’s Hoover Institute on War, Revolution and Peace, saying that he contradicts the university’s standards of morality, personal honor and the rights of others. He may contradict the university’s standards, but Rumsfeld is really a Hoover Institute kind of guy: impressive, experienced and almost always wrong.

What I find amazing is that with all his vast experience, Rumsfeld consistently made the wrong choices. He botched a necessary war (Afghanistan) so that he could start and botch an unnecessary war (Iraq) while squandering America’s hard-earned reputation as a country that truly believes in human rights by setting up torture camps in Cuba and Iraq.

His choices, however, were pretty much in line with the Hoover Institute’s political philosophy. Indeed, the Bush administration has largely been the Hoover Institute’s chance to put their ideas into practice, with disastrous results. Condoleeza Rice was a Hoover fellow and former provost of the university and Rumsfeld was on the Hoover Institute’s board of trustees before W.

As a foreign policy team, Rice and Rumsfeld have made consistently atrocious decisions. They ignored the White House’s chief counter-terrorism advisor Richard Clarke’s repeated warnings that Al Qaeda was dangerous and planning something in the US before September 11. They ignored just about everyone in deciding to invade Iraq under false pretences. Then, after lying their way into an invasion of Iraq, they failed to do any contingency planning if things didn’t go according to their post-conflict predictions that were so rosy they could only have been dreamed up by a fantasist on happy pills. To maintain that fantasy, Rumsfeld fired a whole slew of generals who showed their disloyalty by telling the truth while under oath at Congressional hearings. That barely scratches the surface of the folly perpetrated by the Hoover alumni.

Let’s look at a few of Rumsfeld’s eye-wateringly stupid decisions:
*Invade Afghanistan with too few troops to hold the country or hunt down Al Qaeda and Taliban forces.
*Invade Iraq under false pretences.
*Invade Iraq with too few troops to occupy or pacify the country.
*Seize the oil fields but leave the museums unprotected.
*Dismiss the Iraqi Army and all Bath Party officials leaving no one to maintain law and order or running water or electricity or any other function of government.
*Bring in private companies to do what the military should and could do and for much less money.
*Set up torture camps in Iraq and Cuba and probably in Afghanistan.
*Refuse to send military aid to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina until his decision was overridden by Bush.

There are plenty more, such as pissing off the UK by refusing to share technology in joint military research and development programs, such as the Joint Strike Fighter.

But all of that is really par for the course for Hoover. In general, on any given policy issue, the Hoover Institute can pretty much be counted on getting it wrong. So is it really any surprise that they would like Rumsfeld back? I’m pretty sure that Rice will be back there in 2009.
Don’t believe me about the Hoover Institutes? Here are a few examples of the Hoover Institutes pearls of wisdom:

On current extinction rates:

“The loss of thousands of species per year? About 1,600,000 species have been identified. Estimates of the actual number of species range from 2,000,000 to 80,000,000. No one knows the rate of extinction or the rate at which new species are arising. The best current estimate based on actual observations, and using an extremely high estimate of the likely increase in the extinction rate, is that about seven-tenths of 1 percent of species may go extinct over the next 50 years.” See for yourself here.

Actually, scientists who spend their lives studying the issue disagree by many orders of magnitude. New York’s American Museum of Natural History polled 400 scientists. According to the museum’s press release: “The majority (70%) polled think that during the next thirty years as many as one-fifth of all species alive today will become extinct, and one third think that as many as half of all species on the Earth will die out in that time.” See for yourself here.

On Enron and disclosure of conflicts of interest:

A Hoover Institute policy feature by Robert Hahn, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (a deeply and dogmatically right-wing think tank) concluded that full disclosure of conflicts of interest is a laudable goal but not really achievable and would likely do more harm than good. For good measure it smears economist and New York Times editorial writer Paul Krugman’s character, but avoids his trenchant and compelling arguments and advocates school vouchers, which most education experts see as a way of taking money from cash-strapped state schools and giving it to Christian fundamentalist schools. Hahn, despite being an economist of some note, fails to recognize that his arguments really chip away at the fundamental structure of a market economy — reliable information. See for yourself here.

On defense spending:

Hoover Institute fellow Bruce Berkowitz argues that the US can and should maintain or increase defense spending. See for yourself here.

He illustrates his point with graphs of historical defense spending, never noting that in inflation adjusted dollars, US defense spending is greater than it’s ever been except during Second World War. In real, inflation adjusted dollars, the US is spending more on defense right now than it did during Korea or Vietnam. The hitch is the US isn’t getting what it’s paying for.

Put this into perspective with the following figures that compare what the US bought in 1970 for its defense budget:, which was smaller than recent budgets.
US population
1970: about 200 million.
2004: about 300 million.
Active military:
1970: nearly 3 million.
2004: about 1.3 million.
Deployed forces including National Guard and Reserve:
1970: 475,000, down from 535,000 two years earlier (Vietnam)
2007: 180,000 (Iraq and Afghanistan)

In short, the US is spending more on defense but is deploying fewer people in both absolute numbers and relative numbers. Spending more on defense is not going to help nearly as much as spending smarter. The US defense establishment is addicted to overpriced equipment. For instance, the F-22 fighter is more than $300 million a copy. While it is a great aircraft, is it really worth six F-16s? Can one aircraft be in six places at once? Similarly, a C-130H transport aircraft costs about $37 million, but the new C-130J is about $81 million. I’ve seen the Lockheed Martin sales pitch and they try to justify the cost through the new model’s better range and payload and electronics. But when it comes to doing lots of missions, some of which are not at capacity, it’s better to have more than better.

I could give a lot more examples, but the short version is that the US spends vast amounts of cash to buy wildly overpriced kit and pays for it by scrimping on training. When the US really got into a couple of wars, what everyone else found was what many people had been saying for years: what really matters is reliable, tough basic equipment like radios, armored trucks and body amour and lots and lots of high quality training. Berkowitz, like Rumsfeld, believes in shiny new toys but doesn’t understand that throwing money at defense contractors is not the way to help the military. Just look at the US Marine Corps. They are one of the world’s best fighting forces and they have been overtaxed and starved for funds for their entire history. What the US military really needs right now, in addition to body armor and armored trucks, is soldiers who can speak Arabic and Pashto.

So, the boys at Hoover get it wrong again and again and again. I say let Rumsfeld into the Hoover Institute. As an academic he can’t do any more harm. But just to be sure, wrap a big chain around the institute, lock it tight and then destroy the key in the fires of Mordor.

Back from the Fringe

2007-09-03T14:55:00.000+01:00

Sorry to all the readers who may have been wondering why I haven't posted anything recently. I've been at the Edinburgh Festival performing four to six shows a day, every day for a month, so I haven't really had time. The flyer is of the main show. Here are some of the reviews:

ThreeWeeks:"When you're given a song sheet at the start of the show, you kind of expect the titles of said songs to be themed around God, Jesus and tales of yore, and not threesomes, chat-up lines and sex accidents. Which means watching merry men have such a good time singing about the naughty business will make you either a, sing along, or b, crawl under your seat and die. Though if the latter is the case you probably shouldn't have gone to this show in the first place - the clue is kind of in the title. If the former is you, then you'll find this show good fun. It's a great hour to pass the time with, if you know what I mean - wink wink."

Fresh Air FM (The festival radio station):"Comedians Kate Smurthwaite and David Mulholland present an hour of songs and laughs about sex, relationships and err..sex! David and Kate tell their tales and sing songs about cheesy chat up lines, things learned about sex after you leave school, threesomes and other such practices in a way that leaves you wanting more.
The songs are actually funny and truthful, and Kate’s ability to speak fast yet clearly (she does voiceovers for banks, insurance etc) is put to the test on the final song when they cram in everything they couldn’t fit into the show proper! Song sheets are provided for the audience and singing is actively encouraged: you’ll be singing along in no time.
Wonderful laugh out loud and sing-along fun. Go and see them and discover the song they cut out from ‘My Fair Lady’, you’ll never look at Audrey Hepburn in the same light again!****"

And the public (on edfringe.com, everyone who reviewed us gave us 5 stars, these were a couple of the ones I liked best):

Best thing I've seen and it's free! *****

25 Aug 2007 reviewer: Karen Richards, United Kingdom
"I've paid good money to watch shows with a lot let professionalism and a lot less laughs than this. We were singing along in no time - when we could manage it between laughing our heads off. The music is great too, Kate has an exceptional voice."

Great start to the night. *****

15 Aug 2007 reviewer: Dot , Australia

"This is a brilliant show, better than a lot you'll pay to see. It's funny, relaxed and personal and even has lyric sheets so you can join in. What more could you want?

What a brilliant show and its FREE!!! *****

14 Aug 2007 reviewer: Nicola Smith, United Kingdom
"Took a gamble with the title and was plesantly surprised. This show was FAB!!! Two people singing dodgy songs they'd written about sex and at certian points getting us to join in with them - it was a great start to our evening and went very well with our drinks!!! Go see it, it would be a crime to miss it!!!"

Rail Privatisation Doesn't Work

2007-07-23T14:43:00.000+01:00

In the UK the private sector’s entrance into public transportation has been a disaster. The cost-to-service ratio for privatised railways is shockingly bad. The UK has the highest-priced train system in the world and has the worst actual reliability and service in the EU, including at least most of the new entrants.

The initial privatisation was the result of a deeply misguided religion on both sides of the Atlantic that believes the private sector always does a better job than the public sector, therefore as many functions as possible should be turned over to the benevolent arms of industry. The problem with this faith, is that all the evidence points to it being manifestly false.

UK trains are frequently overcrowded, delayed or cancelled altogether, people pay as much as £10 (about $20) for the pleasure of going as little as 27 miles. While the least expensive service will give you 116 miles for the £10, in practice, those cheap tickets are rarely available and the new plan is to get rid of them altogether. A more realistic fare is Virgin’s London to Manchester standard single ticket at an eye-watering £109.50, putting the cost of travel at 55p a mile, making it Europe's most expensive intercity journey. That type of cost is likely to become normal as fares rise.

By contrast, Polish trains, for instance, are fast, frequent, reliable and timely despite antiquated rolling stock. And the cost of travel is dramatically less. For the price of going from London to Brighton (about 50 miles) in Poland you can go from Krakow to Gdansk (about 300 miles).

So what is the government doing about this? Nothing. The government just released a White Paper on transport, in which the government said that they were going to increase the numbers of passengers and improve the quality of the rail system by cutting the amount of money they give to the rail companies by a third. While that makes grammatical sense, it doesn't make any other kind of sense. It's like George Bush saying his No Child Left Behind education bill was going to improve education by not building schools or paying teachers.

Currently, the UK government gives rail companies £4.5 billion a year and the public pays about £5 billion a year through fares. The plan is for the government to pay £3 billion and the public £9 billion. This raises the issue of what would motivate the private rail companies to spend the government’s money on improving the rail network instead giving it to shareholders. Several years ago it was leaked that one of the private rail bosses actually said that eventually they would have to stop raising fares and decreasing service. Thank you privatisation.

As far as I can tell, this is a strategy to give rail bosses and rail company shareholders a lot of money, while sticking it to everyone else. Already UK rail fares are the highest in the world. How far up can they go? Also, the policy in entirely inconsistent with trying to get people out of their cars and onto trains to cut carbon emissions.

In my personal experience living in London and travelling frequently, I’ve often looked for a train to travel somewhere in the UK only to wind up flying or renting a car because it was so much cheaper that the price difference overcame my desire to minimise my carbon footprint. On one occasion, I decided to go to Spain for a weekend because it was half the price of taking the train to Cornwall. As far as cutting CO2 emissions, this is not the way to go about it.

The words and the actions of the Labour government don’t agree. In the last ten years, the cost of car travel has dropped by 10% in the UK while train fares have risen 6% above inflation and service has become worse as private owners discontinue unprofitable feeder lines, those going from small stations, to concentrate on the major routes. The problem is that without the small feeder lines, there are fewer and fewer people who use the trunk routes.
For many places, the number of trains servicing the area have dropped by dramatically. This makes it difficult to rely on the rail network. My personal experience with the rail system is pretty dismal. I used to live in London and work in Surrey for Jane's Defence Weekly. When I started there was a direct train every 15 minutes to and from the office. When I left Jane’s, there was no direct train to the office. There were two trains that I could take to start the journey and they both required that I change twice and that I wait on an exposed platform for 22 minutes (if the trains were on time) to connect to the third train. Anyone who has lived through an English winter knows that 22 minutes of standing on a platform in gale-driven horizontal stair-rods of frozen rain is not a pleasant way to start the morning. The 15 mile journey took at least an hour and a half. For the return journey, although there was a direct train back to London, there was only one train per hour, which frustratingly, sometimes left early on the rare occasions it wasn’t late. For the pleasure of using this system, I paid about £35 ($70) a week. My other option was to drive, but because London rush hour is so gridlocked and there being no rational route, it would have taken even longer and cost about the same.

You might say to yourself that I should quit whining, but there is a hidden economic impact. By the time I got to the office, frequently late, I and everyone else in the company who lived in London, which was many of them, were knackered. We'd already achieved something significant that morning just getting to the office. And we had it easy, at least travelling from London to Surrey you could find a seat. For all the people doing the commute the other way the trains are filled to sardine tin capacity where anyone who does have a seat, also has someone's buttocks in their face. The discomfort of that experience multiplied by millions of people commuting in and out of London and you probably wind up with about a half a percent of lost GDP growth. You probably also lose another half percent of growth on people being late because of the dilapidated state of the rail infrastructure.

Since the rail privatisation went so well, part of the London Underground was also privatised, with the maintenance contract let to Metronet. The result has been that Metronet is now demanding more money from the government to maintain and repair the rails and signals. While the government has refused, it will eventually be forced to give in because they can’t force the company to go bankrupt or even to undertake work at a loss. If people die as a result of poor maintenance, well, tough luck. For the pleasure of riding the technologically backwards tube, you only have to pay a £4 ($8) for a single trip in zone 1. While many in the UK point out that the London Underground is the oldest in the world, that doesn’t mean they have to keep the original equipment like some sort of living museum. The Paris Metro is only slightly younger than London’s yet the French have constantly refreshed the technology. During the four years I lived in Paris, there was only one occasion that a Metro train was cancelled due to a mechanical problem. In London, statistically, there is more than one failure a day leading to a line being temporarily shut down.

The problem with these privatisation schemes is that they fundamentally don’t make sense. When I was studying economics in graduate school, the main thing I learned was that economics is really the science of motivation and how individual incentive-driven decisions multiplied millions of times become the stuff of macroeconomic indicators. While privatisation schemes are often pushed by conservative economists, the arguments in support of privatisation are closer to religious dogma than the result of economic research.

On a very basic level, a company buying a chunk of infrastructure does not have an incentive to provide safe, efficient and low-cost service. The incentive is to make money. To do that fares should be high and maintenance kept to a minimum, leaving the system expensive, unreliable, and quite possibly dangerous.

It is really time for people to start calling infrastructure privatisation what it is—a chance for a few investors to extort money out of everyone else. That’s not democracy, that’s state-sanctioned extortion.

Iraq in Hell: An Entirely Preventable Tragedy

2007-07-21T12:40:00.000+01:00

Dahr Jamail has posted a fascinating comment on his personal experiences as a reporter in the hell that Iraq has become and the Disney-esque experience of returning to the US. His article brings to light how horrible things have become there on a personal level. Iraq has truly reached the nadir of the Hobbesian existence: “nasty, brutish and short”.

The thing that pains me is that it would never have happened if Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld had listened to the generals instead of firing them. Below is a smattering of what the generals said about the Bush invasion of Iraq:

Gen. Eric Shinseki, Army chief of staff, 1999-2003:

“I would say that what's been mobilized to this point — something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers are probably, you know, a figure that would be required. We're talking about post-hostilities control over a piece of geography that's fairly significant, with the kinds of ethnic tensions that could lead to other problems. And so it takes a significant ground- force presence to maintain a safe and secure environment, to ensure that people are fed, that water is distributed, all the normal responsibilities that go along with administering a situation like this.” This is from his Congressional testimony before the war.

Gen. Merrill "Tony" McPeak, Air Force chief of staff, 1990-94:

“We have a force in Iraq that's much too small to stabilize the situation. It's about half the size, or maybe even a third, of what we need. ... The people in control in the Pentagon and the White House live in a fantasy world. They actually thought everyone would just line up and vote for a new democracy and you would have a sort of Denmark with oil. I blame Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the people behind him — Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary Douglas Feith. The vice president himself should probably be included; certainly his wife. These so-called neocons: These people have no real experience in life. They are utopian thinkers, idealists, very smart, and they have the courage of their convictions, so it makes them doubly dangerous.”

Lt. Gen. William Odom, Director of the National Security Agency, 1985-88:

“It's a huge strategic disaster, and it will only get worse. The sooner we leave, the less the damage. ... The idea of creating a constitutional state in a short amount of time is a joke. It will take ten to fifteen years, and that is if we want to kill ten percent of the population.”

Adm. Stansfield Turner, NATO Allied commander for Southern Europe, 1975-77; CIA director, 1977-81:

“[O]ur current policy appears to be to "stay the course." The problem with not acknowledging that we are changing course is that it makes us do so begrudgingly. The longer we hesitate to increase our troop strength in Iraq; to pour billions of dollars of our own money into reconstruction; and to invite the UN to play a substantive, decision-making role, the more the chance of failure increases.

“Failure in Iraq is simply unacceptable. It would not be just a severe embarrassment, as it was in Vietnam. It would be caving-in to terrorists, and not just to terrorists in Iraq. The president's worldwide "war on terrorism" would be seen as having folded up the minute the going got tough. Whether Al Qaeda has operated out of Iraq in the past or not, it almost certainly would do so in the future.” This is from September 2003

Gen. Anthony Zinni, Commander in chief of the United States Central Command, 1997-2000:

“When I was commander of CENTCOM [the US joint military command in charge of the Middle East], we had a plan for an invasion of Iraq, and it had specific numbers in it. We wanted to go in there with 350,000 to 380,000 troops. You didn't need that many people to defeat the Republican Guard, but you needed them for the aftermath. We knew that we would find ourselves in a situation where we had completely uprooted an authoritarian government and would need to freeze the situation: retain control, retain order, provide security, seal the borders to keep terrorists from coming in.

"It might be interesting to wonder why all the generals see it the same way, and all those that never fired a shot in anger and really hell-bent to go to war see it a different way.”

In conclusion, the mess that Iraq has become was predicted by the generals and many others. Even Molly Ivins predicted an easy war and “the occupation from hell”. The only people that weren’t listening were the people in charge.

While I've always thought that invading Iraq was a bright idea in the same league as sticking a fork into your eye, that we blundered into war ignoring the people who might have salvaged the adventure is unforgivable.

O'Reilly, JetBlue and Daily Kos

2007-07-20T20:26:00.000+01:00

Fox’s Bill O’Reilly lambasted JetBlue for supporting the Daily Kos blogger convention, calling the website a collection of radical left wing hate mongers. They then sent a reporter to ambush Dave Barger, JetBlue’s CEO and asked him if his company supports a hatemongering website that has comments such as:
1. “The world would be better off without Tony Snow”, after his cancer returned;
2. “Better luck next time”, after an assassination attempt against Cheney in Afghanistan;
3. “Evangelicals are nutcases”;
4. “The Pope is a primate”; and
5.“Some attacks on coalition forces are legitimate”, which during the ambush interview changed to “attacks on coalition forces are legitimate”, a small but very significant change.
In response, JetBlue cancelled most of their sponsorship of the event.
Given that the Daily Kos has large numbers of comments that are mostly unregulated a smattering of such comments is not much of a surprise. What is surprising is that these were the best O’Reilly’s team could come up with, especially since some of the comments are pretty justifiable.
1. Tony Snow has done a terrible job and arguably the world would be a better place without him wielding power. I’m not saying I want him dead, just not in power.
2. Cheney has done an astonishingly bad job. Without him in power, the world would be a much better place. Frankly, given the amount of horror that the man has unleashed through his hamstringing the attack on Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan to pursue a disastrous policy in Iraq that has killed and maimed tens of thousands of people to no benefit and great harm to America's security, not to mention his flagrant abuse of power and of the US Constitution, if Cheney died, I wouldn't be overcome with grief.
3. People who embrace superstition that is directly contradicted by scientific evidence ARE nutcases. Think about it, if I said the sea is boiling hot, because my holy book, Alice in Wonderland, said so, you'd rightly call me a nutcase. Same logic applies to evangelicals and evolution.
4. The Pope IS a primate, under both definitions of the word, he is the highest-ranking clergyman and a human. That Fox picked up on this is amazing. It’s like when I was 7 years old and someone would say, “your epidermis is showing”. Also, the only people I can think of who would find this comment offensive are people who have decided that evolution is false despite overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary because it contradicts a literal interpretation of the Bible.
5. It depends on your perspective. From our perspective, no, but we’re the occupiers. There are Iraqi patriots who don’t want occupiers on their land. If the US were invaded because Bush had pissed off another country’s leadership, I think there would be quite a few people who didn’t like Bush and weren’t religious nutters who would fight the occupiers.
By the way, I’ve always thought that Bill O’Reilly really is the “no spin zone” because to spin, you have to start with the truth.

Chicken Hawk Republicans

2007-07-20T17:19:00.000+01:00

This is an interesting video about College Republicans in the US by Max Blumenthal. The thing that is frightening is that these people probably honestly believe what they are saying. They all expressed a totalitarian-foot-soldier mentality that mixed physical cowardice with a love of violence, hero worship, desire to censor, appeals to authority rather than reason, a tendency to censor, and homophobia with gay tendencies that seems to be the hallmarks of thugs and petty bureaucrats that made it possible for such tyrants as Hitler and Stalin to exist.
When asked if they supported fighting in Iraq, they all said, “it’s better to fight them over there than over here”. That was a Bush justification that made all the counter terrorism experts I know slowly drop their shaking heads into their hands while muttering, “what a fucking moron”. The thing is, there weren’t any Al Qaeda in Iraq before we invaded, except in a little enclave that we’d created that Saddam couldn’t get to. But none of these college students had learned enough to think this through with the available facts.
When their views are broken down one can see that they are all expressions of fear. The macho, gun loving, war mongering aspects are all ways of psychologically lashing out at the perceived agents of fear. It’s like a scared little boy playing with a toy gun and pretending to kill what he is afraid of. The only problem is that in real life, with a real military, the deaths and injuries are real.
The fear also leads to hero worship, because when people are afraid they want a strong leader that they feel will protect them. Similarly, fear leads to appeals to authority, such as religion or party dogma. It’s very frightening to not know what is the right thing to do. Real choices are fuzzy. It’s much easier to answer questions based on received wisdom, either from religious superstition or the words of the worshipped leader. Note, people will parrot political propaganda or religious dogma despite it being patently false, for instance, the Bible gives two different genealogies for Jesus, both going to Joseph, who, if the Bible account of virgin birth is to be believed, wasn’t actually related to Jesus. Simple logic, if the Good Book has an obvious flaw, it’s not infallible. Similarly, anyone paying any attention to Iraq will know that Osama had declared a jihad on Saddam. They only had a cease-fire when the US became a pressing common enemy. Now various tribes in the Sunni triangle, who were Saddam’s base, are negotiating cease-fire agreements with US forces so they can concentrate on killing Al Qaeda in Iraq. No matter how many times Bush and Cheney say that Saddam and Osama were working together, it still won’t be true.
I keep going on about fear for a reason. There was a study a couple of years ago of college students that correlated their dreams and their political views. What the study found was that Republican students had vastly more and bleaker nightmares compared to Democrat students. They study’s authors hypothesized that conservatism came more from an emotional fear response than from reason.
I think fear has propped up the Bush administration. Fear mongering has led to an expression of all of the conservative traits that Bush depends on. Compare Bush and Cheney’s constant reference to the enemy trying to destroy our way of life with FDR: “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.”
I was looking for a particularly “be afraid” quote from Cheney, I found an ironic one instead. Cheney was talking about the Enemy in the Global War on Terror, what does it remind you of?
“They seek to impose a dictatorship of fear, under which every man, woman, and child lives in total obedience to a narrow and hateful ideology. This ideology rejects tolerance [and] denies freedom of conscience...”

Good Article on dealing with the Muslim world

2007-07-19T21:13:00.000+01:00

There is a nice article about why the US should get out of Iraq by Gary Kamiya called “Leave the Muslim World Alone”. His basic argument is that the occupation of Iraq is creating the hatred of America in the Muslim world that is the life-giving oxygen for Al Qaeda. End the occupation and Al Qaeda begins to smother as other Sunni groups and Shiites kill them.
I believe the argument is essentially sound. It reminded me of an argument that I made years ago about how the US security obsession with maintaining access to Middle East oil is unnecessary. I've put that idea down in black and white in the post below:

Al Qaeda Is No Threat to Persian Gulf Oil

2007-07-19T21:10:00.000+01:00

The US and the West will always have to opportunity to buy Persian Gulf oil, no matter who runs the Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran and the other Gulf States. The reason is simple: the oil exporters need to sell their oil as badly as we need to buy it.
A great deal of misguided US security policy focuses on securing US access to Persian Gulf oil. The Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq was really an extension of that misguided concern as it certainly had nothing to do with stopping terrorism. Not even Bush is stupid enough to think that Iraq was in any way tied to 11 September or that Iraq posed some sort of real threat. For that big lie, he should be impeached, but that’s another issue.
The basic concern is that religious nutters or some other hostile group would take over one of the countries on the Persian Gulf and halt oil exports, or in the worst case scenario, shoot at everything going through the Straights of Hormuz and stop all tanker traffic. In a war-game, that may seem like a dangerous situation. But it’s not going to happen.
The oil exporters all need the oil revenue to fund their governments. In the case of the two countries that could conceivably block the Straights of Hormuz, Saudi Arabia and Iran, oil exports account for 90% of Saudi’s export earnings and 80-90% of Iran’s. Similarly, oil exports make up 70-80% of Saudi’s state revenues and 40-50% of Iran’s, depending on the year and the prevailing oil price. What that means is that they are completely dependent on their oil exports. If one of those countries is overthrown by religious nutters, as indeed Iran was, that won’t change anything in regard to their oil exports. The US quit buying Iranian oil, but they certainly didn’t stop selling it.
Furthermore, any government of an oil exporter that quit exporting oil for ideological reasons wouldn’t last long. They would either be overthrown from within or a neighbour would take their oil fields. Let’s be honest with ourselves, back in 1990 if Kuwait had stopped exporting oil and Iraq stepped in, George Bush-the-elder would have voiced some lukewarm condemnation of the invasion and then gone golfing while congratulating himself again for personally winning the Cold War.
There are parallels to Persian Gulf oil. In Africa there are diamonds and other valuable minerals. If the governments don’t control the mines, rebel groups take over and run them. Even mercenaries get involved and are paid a portion of the mine’s revenues. The Middle East is a bit more organised than Africa, but it would not be hard to imagine similar situations arising if a bunch of Luddites who wanted to go back to 14th century technology as well as legal systems took over a country. Bear in mind that anyone exporting oil would have a lot more money to hire soldiers and buy weapons than a group that wouldn’t export oil.
In fact, the only conceivable situation that would stop a Middle Eastern country from exporting oil is invading it with a non-Muslim military force, seizing the oil for itself, while allowing the rest of the country to descend into anarchy. Sound familiar?

Good Point, Well Made

2007-07-05T02:01:00.000+01:00

Keith Olbermann of MSNBC comments on Bush pardoning Scooter Libby.

Independence Day Dystopia

2007-07-05T00:51:00.000+01:00

Just a little thought on the 4th of July. The American Declaration of Independence on the 4th of July 1776 justified independence by pointing out that King George of Great Britain had contravened several key features of just rule. Among them were the following:
“For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury:
“For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:”
A decade ago, if you had written a story about the US administration abrogating these principles, you would have had to be writing dystopian science fiction.

The Wanna-Be MacGyver Doctors Still Aren’t Al Qaeda

2007-07-04T10:11:00.000+01:00

Enough already! Everybody is reporting that the UK government is saying that the would-be London and Glasgow bombers were linked to Al Qaeda, only they didn’t.
What government officials have been saying is that the attack is in the same style as Al Qaeda in Iraq and that Al Qaeda is a threat in a general sense. I checked what Gordon Brown and others actually said, and they aren’t claiming that this is an Al Qaeda cell. There is a good article on this on Raw Story under the heading “UK officials caution media reports tying car bomb attacks to Qaeda”.
Even the government link on why the attempted attacks are similar to Al Qaeda attacks is tenuous. Car bomb attacks using widely available ingredients hardly constitutes a pattern unless ETA in Spain, the IRA, the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka and every group in Iraq are all in cahoots. The difference is that those four groups actually make car bombs, not incendiary devices, and the bombs work, also unlike these nitwits.
Also, the reaction to the attempted attacks has been hysterical, with calls to curb civil liberties in response to the “threat”. Let’s look soberly at the real risk. In the past three years, 52 people have died from terrorism, all of them in the 7 July 2005 attacks. According to UK Statistics, in the same time period about 550 people have died of malignant neoplasm of the rectosigmoid junction, rectum and anus, otherwise known as ass cancer. But we’re not talking about taking way our civil liberties to protect us from the threat of ass cancer, are we?

Doctor, doctor
Turns out that the would-be bombers were NHS doctors, and here I was thinking that when the NHS killed people it was an accident.
This raises a couple of interesting questions, such as that many people believe religious nutters are stupid. Sadly, that is not always the case. However, in this instance, the stereotype holds.
These doctors, if they really were doctors, presumably had medical educations, which include chemistry. The “car bombs” — really incendiary devices that failed [see previous blog entry] — didn’t go off because they lacked oxygen. Since this is something that should be obvious to anyone who has an even passing knowledge of how chemicals react, it begs the question of whether the wanna-be terrorists were either pig-stupid or lying about their medical educations. How stupid? They made devices that had petrol and propane but no oxygen to react with. They work in hospitals … that have oxygen bottles in them. They worked in the best place to get bottled oxygen, yet, it didn’t occur to them. Frankly, I find it hard to believe that anyone who has studied chemistry to have made such a basic and obvious oversight — it’s up there with forgetting the eggs in an omelette — that I think that the NHS is hiring people who say they are doctors and aren’t. This is a much bigger risk to people’s lives than a handful of knuckleheads trying to make some bonfires.

Government goofs on London and Glasgow car bombing attempts

2007-07-01T20:06:00.000+01:00

The UK government’s reaction to the recent failed car-bomb attacks in London and Glasgow is deeply flawed in two respects: the threat of another attack and the origin of the attacks.
While the government has increased the terrorism threat level to critical, the highest since just after the 7/7 bombings two years ago, the threat is actually extremely low now. Basically, this group of terrorists have blown their wad and they are on the run.
What I find infuriating is that UK counter terrorist forces had recently noticed that there was an increase in radical Islamist chatter on the internet hinting that a heavily populated area would soon be attacked and they kept quiet about it. The threat was imminent on Thursday afternoon, not now.
The horses are gone, so we might as well leave the barn door open.

Foreign origins?
The other worrisome development is that the government is looking for some foreign tie, namely Al Qaeda.
I will make a prediction, which I rarely do, when this is all investigated, it will be found that there is no connection with Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda organisation. There may be a connection with someone who is foreign and maybe fought in Iraq, but without a formal tie. The chief reason I say this is that the attacks were stunningly incompetent.

Attack of the knuckleheads
The aspect of the attacks that made me sit up and pay attention was that the buffoons behind them didn’t know what they were doing at nearly every level. They clearly didn’t know how to make a bomb (more on that in a bit). They didn’t appear to know that central London is a bad place to park illegally unless you want your car ticketed, clamped and towed in ten minutes flat (those Nigerian parking wardens don’t mess around). Nor did they appear to know that every street in central London has more cameras than a Japanese tour group.
Two of the car “bombs” were easily identified as dangerous, the first by paramedics at Tiger Tiger night club and the second at the impound because of petrol fumes.
The cars had petrol cans, propane tanks and nails and what from news reports sounded like mobile phones set up as alarm clocks, presumably to make a spark. I think the wanna-be MacGyvers had watched too many Die Hard films and didn’t pay enough attention in chemistry class. They packed the cars with stuff that burns in the presence heat and oxygen. They may have had the spark, but without the oxygen, there was nothing for the petrol fumes to react with.
Perhaps they were trying to create a fuel-air explosive, which is a mixture of some flammable substance and oxygen in the air. Such explosions can be very powerful. In military circles they are often known as thermobaric weapons and can be devastating. However, to make them work, one must have a small charge diffuse the fuel into the atmosphere and mix it with oxygen in just the right proportions and then another charge to ignite it. While devastating, they are very difficult to make. The rocket scientists in the attacks didn’t have a charge to diffuse the gas nor a charge to ignite it. Maybe they thought the gas would leak out until it reached the right proportion, instead of just dissipating (again, chemistry class would have helped, partial pressure and all that).
Then comes the nails. Clearly these nincompoops thought the nails would make good shrapnel, which it would have, if they’d actually had a bomb in the cars. If they had somehow succeeded through divine intervention in creating a fuel-air explosion, the explosion would have been generated by the fumes around the car and the vehicle would have been crushed like a tin can and the nails would have been gift wrapped in sheet metal.
I think the worst that could have happened, if the pinheads in London had rolled down the windows and left something burning inside the cars, is one hell of a fire with some red-hot nails in it. You wouldn’t want to stand next to it, but it wouldn’t take out a building. Probably the worst that would happen is what actually happened to the car at Glasgow airport. It got the fire department out of bed and scared a lot of people.

Al Qaeda?
The sheer incompetence of the attacks leads me to believe that Al Qaeda was not involved. That’s not to say that Al Qaeda attacks are always competent, they aren’t. But they have a pretty good history of not being complete, lemon-sucking morons when it comes to making things go bang — just think of the 1993 bomb in the World Trade Center parking garage and the 1998 US embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya.
When it comes to terrorism, Al Qaeda has historically worked like a terrorism venture capital fund. People approach Al Qaeda with a business plan. If it is approved, they receive training and funding to carry it out. If the clowns who just tried to attack London and Glasgow airport had even a little bit of training, they might have hurt someone, other than themselves that is.
But it is unlikely that Al Qaeda is still in the business of international terrorist venture fund. I would think that they would be devoting their energies to helping the Taliban kick the infidels out of Afghanistan and establishing a theocratic caliphate in Iraq (a long stated goal of theirs). It is possible that they would make the calculation that killing people in the UK might hasten the departure of UK forces from Iraq. However, I think that the Western military presence has proved to be a tremendous recruiting tool for Al Qaeda itself and affiliated organisations. Certainly, if I were Abu Ayyub al-Masri, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq (which has sworn allegiance to Al Qaeda), I would want to keep the infidels in Iraq as long as possible to help swell the ranks.

Al Qaedaism
It is unlikely that Al Qaeda as an organisation was involved. But the attackers, which were probably home-grown British Muslims, seemed to share the same philosophy. This is a much more serious issue. It’s not Al Qaeda, but Al Qaedaism. I’m not much of one for “–isms”, but I think it’s appropriate here. There is a rising tide of Muslims who adhere to Al Qaeda’s philosophy and agenda. That philosophy channels the anger of the adherents and allows them to hate and plot murder with a clear conscience, indeed, even to feel noble about doing things that are the purest expression of evil I know of (I have a mental image of a smiling bearded man saying, “That’s right folks, I’m better than you because I pray five times a day, don’t eat pork and murder innocent children for my god”).
A philosophy is much harder to stop than an organisation. Toppling Saddam was easy. All that had to be done was defeating his military and then finding him. Toppling Al Qaedaism is likely to prove very difficult. It is a trans-national social movement that must be stopped with the tools of culture and philosophy. That is a much harder fight and likely requires the West to govern itself and its relations with the Muslim world in a way that is rational and compassionate to provide a philosophy that is more attractive. The current trend is just the opposite. Both the US and the UK have been run corruptly for the benefit of the wealthy to the detriment of all other, both domestically and abroad. Convincing people to give up their anger and religious fantasies in return for the opportunity to be abused and ignored is non-starter.

Rising fanaticism in the US and Middle East are similar

2007-05-21T03:48:00.000+01:00

The rise of Christian fanatics in the US and Muslim fanatics in the Middle East is creating a very dangerous situation that must be addressed before we really do wind up in a clash of civilisations between the West and Islam. Reversing the trend may be difficult, but not impossible.
One of the features of both the Christian right and Al Qaeda-type Muslims is that they both focus on warring with their religious enemies and use their beliefs to brutalise others, allowing them to combine the joys of righteousness with cruelty – a truly heady mix. Think of all the “Christians” who support the idea of kicking women with children off welfare and all the Taliban-think-alikes who force widows to beg in street rather than work.
To reverse the trend we must figure out what are the chief causes of the increase in fanatical beliefs. In both the US and the Middle East, the rise of fanatical religious beliefs coincided with persistently declining standards of living and increasingly corrupt governments and a general slow loss of faith in the secular state. As people increasingly felt that their governments were more interested in shafting and controlling them than helping, and as making ends meet became harder and harder, people began turning to religion for solace. But it is a bitter, angry solace that seeks revenge. As the bitter interpretation of religion grows it spreads throughout the society.
Currently it is meeting some opposition. In Turkey, the military had to threaten to topple the government, again, if it gave control to the religious fanatics. In the US, the last Congressional election and various scandals have staved off control by the Christian right.
But the rise of the Christian right is especially worrisome in upper levels of the US government. The US is too powerful for senior decision-makers to adhere to religious beliefs that require them to wilfully ignore science. Similarly, the same right wingers are not just villainising science, but journalism too. It is a full assault on the finders and purveyors of truth. I suspect this is because the scientists and journalists aren’t agreeing with what the Christian right wants to believe. Look at the Christian right’s views of global warming. They honestly believe that it’s a great international conspiracy of the evil climatologists, atmospheric chemists and meteorologists against the good and pure oil and coal executives. They manage that feat by wilfully ignoring the scientific evidence and the glaring motives for self interest.
But it is not just the Christian right that has rebelled against science and truth. Muslim fanatics similarly create their own, equally fanciful versions of the truth, although they do tend to have and more hate propaganda of the sort that went out of style in the West after WWII.
Both strains of religious fanaticism are inherently authoritarian, requiring all who follow them to shun earthly pleasures and devote themselves to God. Notably, they also require everyone else around them to play along. Even in the US it seems that most people have been cowed by religious fanatics to the point where they are afraid to say they don’t believe in God lest they be labelled godless unbelievers (and probably liberals). The situation is much worse in the Middle East. Converting away from Islam in Afghanistan is punishable by death, in accordance with the Koran.
The problem is that the longer a society holds lunatic ideas and the poorer the sources of information, the worse it will run, creating a downward spiral of superstition and oppression.
It is high time to start looking seriously at the declining standards of living and education, and reverse them in both the US and Middle East. This means that the elites cannot keep pillaging their societies. In George Bush’s America, it means forcing US companies to compete internationally instead of relying on government gifts and taxing the wealthy to bolster the nation.
For the Middle East, the road is going to be harder because they are starting from a lower base and are generally more religious. However, the remedy is the same.

Malnutrition epidemic in UK

2007-05-09T11:07:00.000+01:00

British eating habits are not merely sad and revolting, they are lethal as well, according to the Independent on Sunday.
The two most shocking facts in the articles were that malnutrition costs the National Health Service a whopping £7.3 billion, more than twice as much as obesity, and that two-thirds of women (and nearly a quarter of preschoolers) are deficient in riboflavin.
Let’s look at that again: TWO-THIRDS of women are lacking in riboflavin, holy shit!
So I did a bit of research into this to put it into context. Riboflavin, or vitamin B-2, is a water soluble nutrient that is only stored in minute amounts, so we need to be pretty much constantly eating things such as yeast, liver, oily fish, milk, eggs, beans, asparagus, broccoli and spinach to maintain proper levels.
So what, some might say. Well according to http://www.emedicine.com/med/topic2031.htm, “Riboflavin is important for energy production, enzyme function, and normal fatty acid and amino acid synthesis and is necessary for the reproduction of glutathione, a free radical scavenger.” According to numerous sites, the symptoms include:
•cracked lips,
•cracked corners of the mouth,
•sore tongue,
•numbness in the hands
•oily and scaly skin lesions on the scrotum, vulva or between lips and nose,
•premature wrinkles,
•bloodshot and light sensitive eyes, and
•stunted growth in children
In other words, if you don’t get enough riboflavin, you’re going to be a sickly munter.
But the news gets worse. Riboflavin deficiency is a marker for other deficiencies. So if you are deficient in riboflavin you are also deficient in a host of other nutrients. And in 75% of cases, malnutrition is not identified.
One thing to note in this is that malnutrition is not the same as being underfed. I would guess that a lot of people suffering from riboflavin deficiency and associated nutrients are fat.
This is not a blind guess. When I moved to the UK I was struck by how many people in my office had pale, crinkly skin, looked older than their years, had bloodshot eyes and chapped, cracked lips. Just about everyone who exhibited those symptoms was overweight. In the US there would often be one or two sickly people in an office, far from a majority, and in Eastern Europe there would be none. I also watched their eating habits with amazement. Many of them ate nothing but starches, sugar and low grade fats. Typical lunches would include a basket of chips (French fries for North Americans) or a jacket potato (baked for North Americans) with a can of baked beans or corn tipped over it or bread and margarine or canned cheap pasta. There were also a lot of biscuits and sweets (cookies and candy for the North Americans) throughout the day. Since I spent five years with these people, watched them eat lunch every day and went on numerous business trips with them, I got to see a pretty good representation of what they would and wouldn’t eat. I noted a strong correlation between how fat and sickly they were and what they ate. Even in nice restaurants, many would eat all the starches on the plate, but leave all the salad and vegetables.
Outside of the world of defence I’ve seen similar eating habits. I was at a comedy gig a couple of nights ago. One comic ordered a jacket potato with cheese. The person was visibly distressed that there was salad (mixed young leaves with a vinaigrette, it looked quite nice) on the plate. Not only did the comic not eat the salad, the person didn’t eat any part of the potato that had touched the salad. While this comic is thin, the person looks sickly and moves strangely. Going to the gig I was walking behind this person and didn’t recognise the person and thought that they were mentally or physically handicapped from their walk, which may have nothing to diet, I admit.
I have many more observations of a similar nature.
I’ve come to the conclusion that the British have a deeply f**ked up relationship with food and it is actually harming them and their children. Given that the British are constantly mewling about protecting the children, it seems odd that they don’t see that weaning their children on a diet that no proper hog farmer would feed to his pigs, is a form of child abuse. There is a curious blindness in Britain when it comes to food. There seems to be a sort of angry working-class ethic of not complaining or even noticing that the food they’re eating is, well, crap, combined with deep fears and neuroses about anything unfamiliar.

Iraqi Casualties in Perspective

2006-11-23T18:43:00.000Z

In Baghdad today, 133 people were killed in what appears to have been a co-ordinated attack from six car bombs in Shi’ite areas of the Iraqi capital. So what do the numbers mean?
To put them into perspective, let’s look at the number of Iraqi civilians killed last month. The United Nations puts the number at 3,700, although the Iraqi health minister puts the number lower. I will take the UN’s number since the minister has a vested interest in giving a lower number.
Compare that to the number of German civilians killed per month during the Second World War, 2000-2200, and the significance of the number becomes clearer. But that is not all, Germany had a base population of 78 million at the time and Iraq’s population is 26 million. So in a like for like comparison, Iraqi civilians are now being killed at five times the rate of German civilians during WWII. Note, the estimate for German civilian deaths is from the years during civilian bombing as there were no appreciable casualties before that.
Looking at civilian casualty numbers for Spain during Spanish Civil War also casts some light. During the three years of that conflict about 300,000 civilians were killed, or about 8000 a month.
The conclusion? Iraq is in a civil war that has the lid kept on it by coalition forces.

What now in Iraq?

2006-11-19T21:04:00.000Z

UK Prime Minister Tony Blair agreed that Iraq was a disaster in an interview with Sir David Frost on the new Al Jazeera English language network. While 10 Downing Street has since backtracked, claiming that Blair, in effect, still thinks the emperor’s new clothes are smashing, it brings us a step closer to a public recognition that the invasion of Iraq has flopped.
Such a public admission of failure is probably necessary before we can start looking at how to extricate ourselves from the Iraqi quagmire. How to do that is not going to be easy.
Clearly law and order have broken down to an extreme degree. In the last two weeks alone as many as 150 people were kidnapped from a government building, the Iraqi deputy health minister was kidnapped from his home, 1,000 members of the Iraqi security forces began a campaign in northern Iraq to clear villages of insurgents, a Shi’ite bakery was attacked in Baghdad, killing nine, and the list goes on.
It is time to be honest with ourselves, both in the US and the UK. The effort to topple Saddam and set up a friendly and stable government has failed.
We have three options now.
One, declare victory and leave. This will lead to a bloodbath in the power vacuum left by departing forces. The Sunnis, Shi’ites and Kurds will pitch open war. The Saudis, Syrians, and Iranians will all try to exert influence and probably provide arms and “advisors”. The Turks will likely invade the Iraqi Kurdistan to prevent the creation of a Kurdish state. And lots of people will die.
Two, try to fix Iraq. This will require doubling, tripling or even quadrupling the US force in Iraq and restart the rebuilding effort, which has stopped. Even with this type of commitment, which would have almost certainly worked several years ago, it may be too late. The insurgents are now organised. Stopping them now might require a level of force that is not politically acceptable. Let me explain that. If we took on the tactics of the Mongols during their conquests we would win. But the Mongols were willing to kill every single person in any town or city that rebelled. Despite the Bush administration reviving torture, American soldiers, Congressmen and Senators are not going to go along with mass slaughter.
Three, waffle. This is the current strategy. Rebuilding has stopped. The streets are dangerous. Not even Baghdad is secure. Healthcare, water and electricity is less secure now than under Saddam. And US and UK forces are being killed without achieving anything noticeable on a strategic level. The benefit of this strategy, which I call wallowing in the quagmire, is that Bush and Blair don’t have to admit that they really stepped on their dicks on this one. The disadvantage is it just puts off option one or two for a bit while more people die and more people decide that killing innocent people in the US and UK is a good idea.
On a related topic, it’s not going too well in Afghanistan either. The Taliban have stuck to their strategy, hide for a while and come back. Well, they are back. The UN’s top official in Afghanistan, Tom Koenigs, was quoted in The Guardian as saying that Nato cannot win in Afghanistan and will have to train Afghan forces.
Perhaps the most telling tale of what is going on in Afghanistan are the numbers. Nato killed an estimated 1,000 Taliban fighters in Operation Medusa in September. To put that into perspective, the Germans lost 4,000-9,000 on D-Day and subsequent fighting. The numbers of attacking forces, however, were vastly larger than in Afghanistan. The allies landed 156,000 on D-Day and 326,500 within five days. Nato has about 1/20 of that in Afghanistan.
Another telling number is that the US has made 2,000 air strikes in Afghanistan since June, compared to 88 in Iraq.
And while all that fighting is going on, food stocks in Afghanistan aren’t going to last the winter and people will starve to death without large amounts of food aid. Just my humble guess, but if we feed people who would otherwise die and help them rebuild, I think we will make a lot of friends.