This article, together with your earlier one, "Is Iran out of the war queue?", have set me thinking. Have Kerry and Obama acted smarter than people have given them credit for? There have been reports that Kerry's supposed gaffe was a bit more orchestrated than it appears. Kerry in effect said, "We'll hold our hand (is that a poker term?) if Syria gives up its chemical arsenal." Meanwhile, Putin sez to Assad, "If you don't want to end up either in jail in Holland, or swinging from a lamp-post in Damascus, you'd better get rid of those things fast."
Obama's real enemies are the neo-con hawks at home and the die-hard nationalists currently running Israel. It reminds me of the old joke about the newly elected British MP looking across the House of Commons chamber and saying, "It's great to be face to face with my enemies at last." Only to be told by his more experienced neighbour, "No. Those sitting opposite you are your opponents; your enemies are sitting behind you."
Obama has made two - admittedly tentative - deals with his opponents and comprehensively outflanked his enemies (I'd love to be a fly on the wall when Bibi makes his customary visit to tell the POTUS what to do in a few days' time.)
What happened in Syria and Lebanon during World War 2 is little known in either Britain or France - primarily, I suspect, because the British and French actually fought each other there. Vichy France and Germany started to supply arms to rebels fighting the British in Iraq, so British Empire troops (and some Free French) invaded and took over in 1941. It was during this campaign that Moshe Dayan lost his eye while serving alongside an Australian unit.
Another thing that struck me - Putin seems to be sight more effective at reining in Russia's Middle-eastern client state than Obama is at reining in the USA's Middle-eastern client state.
Being, I suspect, one of the few Brits who's even heard of the late great Molly Ivins, and knowing her opinion of the Texas "lege", I hope she's up there somewhere nodding her approval.
A disturbing aspect of all this was brought to my attention today by German novelist Juli Zeh, writing in the Guardian link to guardian.co.uk
It's that you change your behaviour when you know you're being watched (business schools call it the Hawthorne Effect - if a worker is aware that a manager is around they stop looking at Facebook and get on with some work). I've known for as long as I've used email that it's unwise to use it for anything confidential. Any more than such common-sense restrictions is oppressive.
And this level of surveillance is altogether wrong - the government (of any country) has no business knowing what books I buy from Amazon, who my Facebook friends are, or what I choose to Google.
Some people defend widespread government surveillance on the grounds that finding the bad guys is like looking for a needle in a haystack. Speaking for myself, if I want to find a needle, I look in the sewing-box.
I do take some comfort in the fact that instituting such widespread data-mining is probably a sign that the NSA are pretty incompetent, wasting their time building a huge haystack in the hope that there will be some needles in it.
There may even be some blowback - I could go back to visiting bookshops and buying books in the old non-traceable way. Unless of course someone matches my credit card details to their stock records. Oh well, at least I can make it difficult for them.
I feel that, for once, we in the UK are ahead of the USA. Obama seems to be another Tony Blair - promising a fresh start but delivering little. And getting embroiled in war (not a war, just "war" generally). War makes even the best of leaders do terrible, stupid things - like Churchill's interning of Italian immigrants and German refugees from Hitler under his infamous "collar the lot" policy, and FDR following suit with the internment of Japanese-Americans after Pearl Harbor.
As a Brit, I didn't know why US memorial practice is out of sync with Britain's 11 November memorial day, so thanks for this.
British war memorials are pretty much restricted to the two world wars. In France, it's the world wars plus Algeria (I can't recall if French deaths in Viet Nam are comemmorated). The really sad ones are the German second world war cemeteries, commemorating so many who died for such an utterly unworthy cause.
Phyllis Bennis is spot-on regarding the effect of the sports boycott on South Africa. It also opened up the debate in the UK and elsewhere in a way that commercial boycotts could not. And let's not forget, once apartheid was gone, South African sport had a renaissance, with its crowning moment when Nelson Mandela inspired the national rugby team (still almost entirely white) to win the 1995 World Cup.
He used to appear quite regularly on the BBC's main radio news and current affairs radio programme, "Today". So did Joe Arpaio. One could never be sure if they appeared simply because they are rentamouth egomaniacs, eager to sound off on any subject, or because the BBC editors felt their audience needed a good laugh to send them off to the office in the morning.
BTW, less of the freckles and red hair - that's a sign of Viking blood. We true Celts are dark-complexioned, due to hiding out in southern Spain in the last Ice Age. Fact (or so my granny told me).
There were plenty of ground forces on their way there, though. I remember seeing columns of tanks and huge convoys of ammuniton trucks on Britain's motorways at the time. I'm sure, too, that "success" in Kosovo contributed to Britain's and the US's over-confidence in Iraq four years later.
Lord Acton's dictum was specifically about religious authority. As a leading British Catholic layman in the 19th century, he was appalled by the introduction of the doctrine of papal infallibility, and this was the context for his famous (and all too prescient) remark.
Sadly, LaPierre's speech was all too successful in one respect. The usual trolls and 2nd amendment diehard/blowhards had been noticeable by their absence from the readers' discussion and comment sections of newspapers and news websites. But they're out in force today. One has to assume that his main aim was to rally the troops and start to push back against the tide of justified anger that has just swept over the NRA.
Interesting. Murdoch seems to have well and truly lost his mojo. Backing losers politically; senior exectutives at News Corp jumping ship. And today this in the UK Independent (and other non-Murdoch papers), about his knowledge of likely criminal actions at the Sun and the New York Post:
Good to see this item linked to and quoted on the Guardian's Middle East blog today. Sadly, though, it didn't seem to get any attention from the commenters there - the dicussion (as so often on sites with large numbers of commenters) having descended largely into schoolyard name calling.
You would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh at the discomfiture of Generals Dreedle and Peckem - sorry, that should read Petraeus and Allen. I hope that somewhere in the aetherium Joseph Heller is chuckling quietly.
The idea that Petraeus had to resign because he could be blackmailed is illogical. Once the story was made public, he might appear dishonourable, he'll doubtless catch hell from Mrs Petraeus, but he can no longer be blackmailed. So there's no reason for him to resign.
So what else do the Stasi, sorry, I mean the FBI, have on him?
And don't forget what happened on US general election day in 2008. The Israelis broke the ceasefire with hamas in Gaza, setting the awful Operation Cast Lead in train
Like Wile E Coyote, Bibi has just walked off a cliff, but hasn't yet realised what he has done. So, by the laws of cartoon physics, he hasn't started to plummet yet. But fall he will.
I nearly choked on my breakfast when I read that part of Blair's defence was that Iraq was now a wealthier country than it was under Saddam - but then our Tony does have a real affection for the folding stuff, so I shouldn't really have been surprised. I choked, too, as I was reading it on my way home from a trip to Norway - a truly civilised country.
Oh dear, Niall Ferguson, one of Britain's most successful exports to the USA. The man who believes the first world war was all Britain's fault. (Check out Pankaj Mishra's demolition job on him in the London Review of Books link to lrb.co.uk)
Please keep him employed at Harvard and only let him back over this side of the Pond to attend weddings and funerals.
The new Scottish law was introduced to try to defuse the poisonous sectarianism attached to the two big Glasgow football clubs: Celtic (Catholic) and Rangers (Protestant). Things had come to a head when Protestant extremists sent a parcel bomb to Celtic's manager. (I remember some twenty years ago, a work colleague of mine, who was a Rangers fan, almost fainting when she heard that Rangers had signed a Catholic player!) More recently, the God of Irony has intervened, with Rangers going bankrupt over unpaid taxes (a symptom of the crazy financing of British soccer). They have been readmitted to the Scottish league's lowest division, so there will be far fewer Celtic/Rangers games for the next few years.
Very sad, especially in the light of the celebration of multiculturalism here in the UK that is Team GB. As one one witty comment on the Guardian website after Britain's three track and field gold medals on Saturday put it: "A ginger-haired guy, a mixed race woman and a black Muslim walk into a bar. Everyone falls over themselves to buy them a drink."
As a footnote to reaon No. 10, Margaret Thatcher, heroine of the Republican right, was always very wary of Israel. Despite (or maybe because of) the fact that her parliamentary constituency in north London has a significant Jewish population, she never forgot that the Israeli leaders with whom she dealt had British soldiers' blood on their hands.
Well, the Mittster has finally arrived here in Britain/England/the United Kingdom and, judging by the press coverage so far, it appears he only ever opens his mouth to change feet. His tactless comments on the preparations for the Olympics have upset everyone from our prime minister on down. I'm lovin' it.
I think Romney's campaign is a clever ploy by the Bush clan, who are most anxious that Dubya should not go down in history as the USA's worst president.
Another factor in the low murder rate by gun in the UK is that after our two biggest spree killings,gun laws were amended, and quickly too. After Hungerford in 1987, assault rifles of the sort used in the killings were banned. After Dunblane in 1996, handguns were banned. (Among other consequences, this means that the British Olympic shooting teams do much of their training abroad now.)
The Israelis have been threatening to attack Iran for ages. All discussion of this so far seems to be about whether their air force has sufficient capacity to do this effectively, and I strongly suspect that the answer is: no. So the threat to use a nuke seems highly plausible to me.
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This article, together with your earlier one, "Is Iran out of the war queue?", have set me thinking. Have Kerry and Obama acted smarter than people have given them credit for? There have been reports that Kerry's supposed gaffe was a bit more orchestrated than it appears. Kerry in effect said, "We'll hold our hand (is that a poker term?) if Syria gives up its chemical arsenal." Meanwhile, Putin sez to Assad, "If you don't want to end up either in jail in Holland, or swinging from a lamp-post in Damascus, you'd better get rid of those things fast."
Obama's real enemies are the neo-con hawks at home and the die-hard nationalists currently running Israel. It reminds me of the old joke about the newly elected British MP looking across the House of Commons chamber and saying, "It's great to be face to face with my enemies at last." Only to be told by his more experienced neighbour, "No. Those sitting opposite you are your opponents; your enemies are sitting behind you."
Obama has made two - admittedly tentative - deals with his opponents and comprehensively outflanked his enemies (I'd love to be a fly on the wall when Bibi makes his customary visit to tell the POTUS what to do in a few days' time.)
What happened in Syria and Lebanon during World War 2 is little known in either Britain or France - primarily, I suspect, because the British and French actually fought each other there. Vichy France and Germany started to supply arms to rebels fighting the British in Iraq, so British Empire troops (and some Free French) invaded and took over in 1941. It was during this campaign that Moshe Dayan lost his eye while serving alongside an Australian unit.
Another thing that struck me - Putin seems to be sight more effective at reining in Russia's Middle-eastern client state than Obama is at reining in the USA's Middle-eastern client state.
Hooray for Parliament, and my own MP, Speaker John Bercow, who chaired the debate with his customary skill.
I note that John Kerry's reaction, without a trace of irony, was that the USA could not be held to the foreign policies of other countries.
Being, I suspect, one of the few Brits who's even heard of the late great Molly Ivins, and knowing her opinion of the Texas "lege", I hope she's up there somewhere nodding her approval.
A disturbing aspect of all this was brought to my attention today by German novelist Juli Zeh, writing in the Guardian
link to guardian.co.uk
It's that you change your behaviour when you know you're being watched (business schools call it the Hawthorne Effect - if a worker is aware that a manager is around they stop looking at Facebook and get on with some work). I've known for as long as I've used email that it's unwise to use it for anything confidential. Any more than such common-sense restrictions is oppressive.
And this level of surveillance is altogether wrong - the government (of any country) has no business knowing what books I buy from Amazon, who my Facebook friends are, or what I choose to Google.
Some people defend widespread government surveillance on the grounds that finding the bad guys is like looking for a needle in a haystack. Speaking for myself, if I want to find a needle, I look in the sewing-box.
I do take some comfort in the fact that instituting such widespread data-mining is probably a sign that the NSA are pretty incompetent, wasting their time building a huge haystack in the hope that there will be some needles in it.
There may even be some blowback - I could go back to visiting bookshops and buying books in the old non-traceable way. Unless of course someone matches my credit card details to their stock records. Oh well, at least I can make it difficult for them.
I feel that, for once, we in the UK are ahead of the USA. Obama seems to be another Tony Blair - promising a fresh start but delivering little. And getting embroiled in war (not a war, just "war" generally). War makes even the best of leaders do terrible, stupid things - like Churchill's interning of Italian immigrants and German refugees from Hitler under his infamous "collar the lot" policy, and FDR following suit with the internment of Japanese-Americans after Pearl Harbor.
As a Brit, I didn't know why US memorial practice is out of sync with Britain's 11 November memorial day, so thanks for this.
British war memorials are pretty much restricted to the two world wars. In France, it's the world wars plus Algeria (I can't recall if French deaths in Viet Nam are comemmorated). The really sad ones are the German second world war cemeteries, commemorating so many who died for such an utterly unworthy cause.
Phyllis Bennis is spot-on regarding the effect of the sports boycott on South Africa. It also opened up the debate in the UK and elsewhere in a way that commercial boycotts could not. And let's not forget, once apartheid was gone, South African sport had a renaissance, with its crowning moment when Nelson Mandela inspired the national rugby team (still almost entirely white) to win the 1995 World Cup.
He used to appear quite regularly on the BBC's main radio news and current affairs radio programme, "Today". So did Joe Arpaio. One could never be sure if they appeared simply because they are rentamouth egomaniacs, eager to sound off on any subject, or because the BBC editors felt their audience needed a good laugh to send them off to the office in the morning.
BTW, less of the freckles and red hair - that's a sign of Viking blood. We true Celts are dark-complexioned, due to hiding out in southern Spain in the last Ice Age. Fact (or so my granny told me).
There were plenty of ground forces on their way there, though. I remember seeing columns of tanks and huge convoys of ammuniton trucks on Britain's motorways at the time. I'm sure, too, that "success" in Kosovo contributed to Britain's and the US's over-confidence in Iraq four years later.
Lord Acton's dictum was specifically about religious authority. As a leading British Catholic layman in the 19th century, he was appalled by the introduction of the doctrine of papal infallibility, and this was the context for his famous (and all too prescient) remark.
How very different from apartheid South Africa. Prisoners used to fall out of high windows there.
Wow! A year before the Communist Manifesto.
Sadly, LaPierre's speech was all too successful in one respect. The usual trolls and 2nd amendment diehard/blowhards had been noticeable by their absence from the readers' discussion and comment sections of newspapers and news websites. But they're out in force today. One has to assume that his main aim was to rally the troops and start to push back against the tide of justified anger that has just swept over the NRA.
Another hideous irony - the Taliban, too, think they have the right to bear arms to resist government tyranny.
Interesting. Murdoch seems to have well and truly lost his mojo. Backing losers politically; senior exectutives at News Corp jumping ship. And today this in the UK Independent (and other non-Murdoch papers), about his knowledge of likely criminal actions at the Sun and the New York Post:
link to independent.co.uk
The BBC isreporting that Israel is planning to build 3,000 new settler homes in east Jerusalem and the West Bank:
link to bbc.co.uk
As Talleyrand is supposed to have said - worse than a crime, a blunder.
Good to see this item linked to and quoted on the Guardian's Middle East blog today. Sadly, though, it didn't seem to get any attention from the commenters there - the dicussion (as so often on sites with large numbers of commenters) having descended largely into schoolyard name calling.
You would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh at the discomfiture of Generals Dreedle and Peckem - sorry, that should read Petraeus and Allen. I hope that somewhere in the aetherium Joseph Heller is chuckling quietly.
The idea that Petraeus had to resign because he could be blackmailed is illogical. Once the story was made public, he might appear dishonourable, he'll doubtless catch hell from Mrs Petraeus, but he can no longer be blackmailed. So there's no reason for him to resign.
So what else do the Stasi, sorry, I mean the FBI, have on him?
And don't forget what happened on US general election day in 2008. The Israelis broke the ceasefire with hamas in Gaza, setting the awful Operation Cast Lead in train
Sounds like they don't read Sun Tzu on the art of war. I did, and found it very useful when I was a union negotiator:-)
Like Wile E Coyote, Bibi has just walked off a cliff, but hasn't yet realised what he has done. So, by the laws of cartoon physics, he hasn't started to plummet yet. But fall he will.
I nearly choked on my breakfast when I read that part of Blair's defence was that Iraq was now a wealthier country than it was under Saddam - but then our Tony does have a real affection for the folding stuff, so I shouldn't really have been surprised. I choked, too, as I was reading it on my way home from a trip to Norway - a truly civilised country.
Oh dear, Niall Ferguson, one of Britain's most successful exports to the USA. The man who believes the first world war was all Britain's fault. (Check out Pankaj Mishra's demolition job on him in the London Review of Books link to lrb.co.uk)
Please keep him employed at Harvard and only let him back over this side of the Pond to attend weddings and funerals.
The new Scottish law was introduced to try to defuse the poisonous sectarianism attached to the two big Glasgow football clubs: Celtic (Catholic) and Rangers (Protestant). Things had come to a head when Protestant extremists sent a parcel bomb to Celtic's manager. (I remember some twenty years ago, a work colleague of mine, who was a Rangers fan, almost fainting when she heard that Rangers had signed a Catholic player!) More recently, the God of Irony has intervened, with Rangers going bankrupt over unpaid taxes (a symptom of the crazy financing of British soccer). They have been readmitted to the Scottish league's lowest division, so there will be far fewer Celtic/Rangers games for the next few years.
Very sad, especially in the light of the celebration of multiculturalism here in the UK that is Team GB. As one one witty comment on the Guardian website after Britain's three track and field gold medals on Saturday put it: "A ginger-haired guy, a mixed race woman and a black Muslim walk into a bar. Everyone falls over themselves to buy them a drink."
As a footnote to reaon No. 10, Margaret Thatcher, heroine of the Republican right, was always very wary of Israel. Despite (or maybe because of) the fact that her parliamentary constituency in north London has a significant Jewish population, she never forgot that the Israeli leaders with whom she dealt had British soldiers' blood on their hands.
Well, the Mittster has finally arrived here in Britain/England/the United Kingdom and, judging by the press coverage so far, it appears he only ever opens his mouth to change feet. His tactless comments on the preparations for the Olympics have upset everyone from our prime minister on down. I'm lovin' it.
I think Romney's campaign is a clever ploy by the Bush clan, who are most anxious that Dubya should not go down in history as the USA's worst president.
Another factor in the low murder rate by gun in the UK is that after our two biggest spree killings,gun laws were amended, and quickly too. After Hungerford in 1987, assault rifles of the sort used in the killings were banned. After Dunblane in 1996, handguns were banned. (Among other consequences, this means that the British Olympic shooting teams do much of their training abroad now.)
The Israelis have been threatening to attack Iran for ages. All discussion of this so far seems to be about whether their air force has sufficient capacity to do this effectively, and I strongly suspect that the answer is: no. So the threat to use a nuke seems highly plausible to me.