“That one can convince one’s opponents with printed reasons, I have not believed since the year 1764. It is not for that purpose that I have taken up my pen, but rather merely to annoy them, and to give strength and courage to those on our side, and to make it known to the others that they have not convinced us.”
G.C. Lichtenberg (1742 – 1799), courtesy of 'Deogolwulf'
And how does Ulster compare with Hawaii, Mr. President? Oh dear, if there is any chemistry going on between these two then it's about to explode! Meanwhile, 'Dim Dave' bimbles about, oozing old Etonian charm like an ineffectual maitre d' at some posh restaurant, all of which has zero effect on the various 'house guests' who are as ripe a collection of crooks, killers, liars, cheats and reprobates as you could ever wish to avoid. Yesterday, I had Sky News playing for most of the day with the sound off because I was buried in a book (more on that later*). Glancing occasioanlly at the screen was quite interesting because, of course, without the sound you watch the body language. There was an hysterical press conference between 'Vlad 'n' Dave' in which Dave pursed his little lips, furrowed his brow in order to look really, really serious and appeared to say absolutely nothing. Vlad simply stood there looking as though he would rather have a winter in Siberia than two days in Ulster (he may not be wrong there!) and from the expression on his face as Dave waffled on I began to suspect that he was fantasizing about one day getting Dave down in the cellars at the Lubyanka!
What a colossal waste of time and money this whole farrago has been! Nothing has been solved or even inched forward. It reminded me of Chamberlain rushing off to lick Hitler's boots and then coming back and waving his useless bit of paper and promising "peace in our time". I also thought of my own personal 'hero' in the world of foreign policy, Sir Edward Grey, who in his eleven years as Foreign Secretary never set foot abroad - and quite right, too! And if you doubt the ridiculousness of this whole travelling circus let me tell you that the most hilarious sight was that of the Laurel and Hardy of the European dis-Union, Herman AchilleVan Rompuy and José Manuel Durão Barroso. What they added to the proceedings God only knows - a few surreptitious giggles, possibly.
(* The book which has captivated me is the one on which I bestowed a rave review last Sunday despite having only reached page 79, but now I am up to page 449 and it has already gained my Corker of the Year Award. It is ideal holiday reading, a good meaty plot culminating in a tense court trial and written impeccably, the author has the knack of writing dialogue in the style of the speaker concerned. The revelations, as they come one by one, are not so much clues concerning the murder but more about about the psychology of the people involved, not least the 'hero'. Do not miss: Defending Jacob by William Landay)
Are our political rats worse than their political rats? When I write "our" I mean mainly British and American because I know more about them than other democracies, and by "their" I mean any of the sundry dictatorships that litter our global pavements like so many dog droppings. I suspect, gloomily, that there isn't too much in the way of difference between them because it seems to me that it is precisely and exactly the same sort of people who go in for politics as a full-time occupation in whatever part of the world they are situated. They all share both that besetting vice of wanting to boss people around and the absolute conviction that they know best. Happily, they mostly also share another characteristic - sublime stupidity. Unhappily, that often makes them "useful idiots" in the hands of people we rarely see but who frequently operate the real levers of power, that is, the senior civil servants, trade union bosses, the generals and admirals, and occasionally, the odd philosopher or two. The great difference between the two types of polity is that in our democratic system we do get the chance every five years to toss the rascals out which at least keeps them slightly honest - not very, but slightly! The people of North Korea, to choose but one from a myriad, have absolutely no chance of giving their politicians a smack and that is why their country resembles Bedlam with the loonies in charge. However, the sophistry employed by our democratic leaders which rarely withstands more than 3.7 seconds of scrutiny is not much of an advert. "Government of the people, by the people, for the people" would only be accurate if you substituted the last two 'peoples' with the word 'politicians'! And anyway, government by the people would be ghastly; all the people I know are more or less clueless not least because they always disagree with me! Need I say more?
Hubble-bubble, Egyptian toil and trouble: There is a fascinating and well-worth reading book review at Democracy Journal by Marc Lynch. He is a middle-east politics swot and he is reviewing a book by Carrie Rosefsky called The Muslim Brotherhood: Evolution of an Islamist Movement. In it she describes the development of the movement and the way in which its almost non-stop persecution meant that over the years it retreated even further into dogma whilst persecuting its very own modernisers, and all of that meant that it was totally unfit to govern when Mubarak fell. After decades off shouting slogans the actually very messy business of governing is proving too much for it. Now, facing a hostile electorate, it is wondering whether or not to stick to democratic free elections, whilst its so-called democratic opponents are considering the advantages of an army take-over. Like its northern counterpart, Turkey, Egypt hovers on the cusp. Fascinating to watch, hell to partake!
A history of three beards: As so often I came across this amusing and elegantly written essay via the excellent offices of Arts & Letters Daily. This particular essay was written by Donald Hall, a poet and man of letters - and, no, I hadn't heard of him either although now I wish I had. During his life, he tells us, he grew three beards.
His second wife described the early growth of his beard, thus:
1. A page of exclamation points. 2. A class of cadets at attention. 3. A school of eels. 4. Standing commuters. 5. A bed of nails for the swami. 6. Flagpoles of unknown countries. 7. Centipedes resting on their laurels. 8. The toenails of the face.
Hall is both amusing and shockingly honest. Here he summarises a mutual seduction:
When she left the room to pee, I waited by the bathroom door for her to emerge. I led her unprotesting to the bedroom, and a few moments later, gaily engaged, she said, “I want to put my legs around your head.” (It was perfect iambic pentameter.) When we woke up, we became friends.
At a moment like that only a true poet could be picking up the rhythm of an iambic pentameter. Go give it a read, it's worth it.
'Paddy' Obama falls for the 'Oirish' trick:According to the Paddies, Obama, like every single American president - ever! - is one fourty-seventh, or two twenty-sixths, or, well, indeed to goodness, somethin' or other, part 'Oirish'. Well, as good jokes go it's not bad but any joke told fourty-four times begins to pall.
So the menopause is all men's fault: Why am I not surprised? Everything is our fault according to 'wimmin'. Mind you, this piece of, er, research is based on computer modeling so, like global warming predictions, you can safely ignore it. CBS Pittsburgh reports the story and if you want a change from the wife telling you what else is your fault then give it a read - unlike the nagging at least it's short!
Beach reading: It's bucket-and-spade time again and you will need some good holiday reads, you know, the sort of books that you don't have to keep re-reading in order to follow the thread! I have just finished the latest Harry Bosch tale, as told by Michael Connelly in The Black Box. Harry went off a bit recently but he's back in form with this fairly straighforward police procedural dealing with a 20-year old 'cold case'. The 'Memsahib' bought it for me for my birthday so you can see she knows exacly how low my brow is! I really shouldn't recommend this next one because I'm only on page 79 but I'm lovin' it already! Defending Jacob by William Landay is a combined murder and courtroom legal fight and I just love those stories if they are done well. Landay has been compared by one critic to Scott Turow, than which, etc, etc. Anyway, so far, so excellent but if I am forced to give up at the halfway point I shall apologise!
As I watch, rather helplessly, as Turkey slowly turns and cooks on the spit, I am reminded of a post I wrote just over two years ago entitled "The decline and fall of Arab civilisation?" - and please note the question mark at the end! I think I would alter that today to read 'The decline and fall of Islam' - without any query at the end. You don't need a PhD in geopolitics to work out that the Islamic states of north Africa and the middle east are engaged in a gigantic internal struggle somewhat akin to that which occupied the English over the question of the Divine Right of Kings and then later the civil war which was to decide between monarchs and parliament. All of that took centuries but things move faster these days, almost as fast as the speed of light which accelerates touches on a keyboard round the world virtually instantaneously.
Most of the various Islamic turmoils are difficult to work out because they are bedevilled by a variety of religious 'groupuscles' of either more or less fanaticism plus some embryonic secularists who have fallen for western ways. However, in Turkey the situation is more clearly defined. First of all, Turks have enjoyed two free-ish elections recently and there is something magical about voting - especially if you have never had the chance before. It is such a simply device but just for that magical moment it empowers you and once enjoyed most people do not ever want to give it up.
Turkey, of course, is a divided nation and a huge gulf exists between town and country Turks. The former have drunk (some of them literally!) at the well of western ideas but even more important they have prospered on western capitalism. These twin influences have eroded their Islamism, particular amongst the young, both males and females. The country Turks, of course, remain deeply conservative and the greater the perceived threat is to their Islamic religion the more fiercely they cling to it. Mr. Erdogan, the prime minister, has played to this re-actionary segment of the population and duly won the (free-ish) election handsomely. However, in gradually moving the nation further into compliance with strict Islamic laws he seems to have under-estimated the resentments of the young but noisy and violent youth of his cities. They may be in a minority but the wealth of Turkey depends on the new urban industries and the unions will side with the westernised workers who form their membership.
Thus, all along the eastern seaboard of the Mediterranean from Turkey, through Syria and down into Egypt we have "this sea of troubles" and it is difficult, if not impossible, to work out how it will end, although 'tears before bedtime' can be expected!
If you have nails, prepare to bite them now: For the last two days the new Chinese president has been in talks with Obama who has been supported in these subtle and delicate negotiations by, er, John Kerry ... yeeeees, quite! One would like to think ... hope? ... that behind the scenes there is a top level of serious, intelligent and strategically-minded thinkers in the State Department to guide these two dummies men as they lay the groundworks for a new Sino-American 'arrangement' in the Pacific. Well, a man may hope, may he not? Mind you, and to be fair, I also hope that Xi Jingping has the political muscle and guile to keep his bellicose military under control.
What's the French for 'dropping a bollock? Well, we have the Duke of Edinburgh to keep us endlessly amused by his ability to drop bollocks but now the French have President Hollande to do it for them. On a state visit to Japan he expressed his condolences to the people of China - eh? what? waddesay? - for the deaths of ten Japanese citizens in a recent terrorist attack in Algeria. 'Eh bien, zey all look zee same, do zey not?' The Japanese, I'm glad to say, remained, er, inscrutable! And I have just remembered the French expression - un faux pas. In Japanese it's called a - 失言. See, you never stop learning on this blog!
How dare they! This, from an article at The American Spectator:
The strange irony here is that critics initially regarded pulp fiction as gauche pseudo-literature read by friendless kids, blue-collar rubes, and chronic masturbators.
Well, I don't know which category I fit into but as a devoted, not to say, voracious, reader of pulp fiction I think it says all that needs to be said - about critics! The article, by Daniel J. Flynn, reports on a recent effort to list the greatest writing in TV drama series. The Wire only came 9th - morons!
I am perplexed - so what's new? - by the furore over security agencies collecting what amounts to several landfill sites of electronic data as a means of searching for some indications that X, Y or Z might, or might not, be contacting terrorist organisations. My instant re-action was that I would have been exceedingly cross if they were not doing that sort of thing. That, after all, is what we pay them for and as I have an aversion - a very strong aversion - to body parts being blown across tube trains and London buses then I don't mind if some mole at Cheltenham finds out about my frequent web-visits to the site of Miss Whackem's Institute for the Discipline of Naughty Young Gels because, of course, as you know, dear Reader, it is entirely innocent and is simply a means by which I can research the appalling lack of discipline in our 'skools' today - see previous post!
Also, I am equally perplexed at the notion that when you do anything on 'the net' it is somehow 'private' and 'privileged'. Of course it's not, it never has been and never will be. It is no different in essence from living in a 19th century village or small town in which the local squire is spotted paying the occasional visit to 'Widow Twanky', no doubt, he would say, for the puroposes of comforting her in her loss! All actions are public not private, the only difference is that some are spotted and some are not. So it is best to work on the assumption that sooner or later whatever you do will be noted by someone somewhere.
What is more important than the collection of information which will happen no matter what, is what the authorities do with it! If they, by which I mean the professionals in the security services, simply concentrate on the 'baddies' then I wish them well. Instantly, of course, that begs a definition of 'baddies' which you, me and the man in the street would have no difficulty in defining, but those twisted, psychopathic, mental retards who have allowed politics to rule their lives and who, by means of slithering and greasing their way up the political pole have reached positions of real power, only ever think that their political enemies are the real enemies of the state. We have just discovered a prime example of this with the current imbroglio in the USA where the enormously powerful Internal Revenue Service has been infiltrated by Left-wing activists raised in their youth in the hothouse of campus politics and who see it as their duty, no less, to use bureaucratic malignancy to attack their political opponents.
I leave you with one thought, in the event of the next Labour government would you want some paid Westminster minion of Len McCLuskey to have access to your collected data? Take that as a 'no', shall I?
So, here we go again, yet another Argentinian tango led by another corrupt, autocratic 'Gangster-in-Chief-for-Life' although to be honest Madame Dictator President Kirchner is a bit better looking and, hopefully, more sober that Galtieri ever was. According to Jaime Daremblum in today's PJ Media:
The poverty and the corruption are bad enough but now La Kirchner and her 'thugocracy' are moving in on the hitherto independent judiciary and that has proved the last straw for a considerable number of Argentinian people:
The immediate trigger for the April 18 protests was a Kirchner proposalto abolish judicial independence, but the demonstrators also expressed concerns about everything from sky-high inflation to violent crime to government attacks on press freedom. In the weeks following their protests, they received good news and bad news. The good news was that Argentina’s court system pushed back against Kirchner’s war on free expression. The bad news was that government-allied lawmakers enactedher judicial “reforms,” which means that the ruling party will now have majority control over the legal council that appoints and (if necessary) removes federal judges.
And so once again poor Argentina which could so easily be rich Argentina is swirling down the plughole of stupid corrupt dictatorship. As always, the rich will get richer and the poor will be reduced to scavenging landfill sites - again. If they're lucky - very lucky - Kirchner may just manage to keep the country from declaring war on someone - anyone, really - but probably us Brits and thus the poor hombres will not be rounded up and sent off to take the Falklands for the greater glory of La Kirchner.
Really, what have the Argentinians done to deserve her?
". . . all you gentlemen ever talk of is war!" Thus spake, not Zarathustra, but the truly beautiful Vivien Leigh in her opening lines as Scarlett O'Hara - and I surely do not need to tell you the name of the film even if next year marks its 75th anniversary! Anyway, all of that, in my usual rambling way, is by way of telling you about a new book just published on military philosophy. In a review in the TLS, Michael Howard (and military historian/philosophers do not come much more distinguished than him) places it up there alongside Clauswitz, no less, which is some compliment given that the writer, Emile Simpson, was recently a junior officer serving with the Gurkhas in Afghanistan.
Even an old ex-corporal like me has gradually become aware that the nature of warfare has changed since the days of the 18th/19th century. There are now aspects to war which were never a consideration for Frederick the Great and Napoleon Bonaparte, although the first inklings were discernible during 'Boney's' adventures when an army's ranks began to be filled by civilians, not just professional soldiers, and the sheer size spelled the end of command and control by a single commander however large his genius. The young Prussian officers who rebelled ('viz absolute korrectness, natürlich!) against the stultifying control of their king after their defeats by Napoleon, saw the changes that would be needed in an age of 'the nation in arms' and invented what became the German General Staff.
But in the 20th century a new element entered warfare - public opinion. The 20th century saw the culmination of 'the nations in arms' and the colossal struggles that ensued and it became glaringly apparent that the correct message be relayed to the people to keep them involved - a national narrative was required:
The narrative must not only be persuasive in rational terms. It also needs drama to appeal to the emotions. Above all, it needs an ethical foundation. Not only one’s own people, but the wider “strategic audience” must believe that one is fighting a “good” war. The genius of Winston Churchill in 1940 was to devise a strategic narrative that not only inspired his own people, but enlisted the support of the United States: indeed, most of British military operations in the early years of the war were planned with an eye on that strategic audience. The great shortcoming of Hitler’s strategy was his failure to create a strategic narrative that appealed to anyone apart from his own people – and a rapidly decreasing number of them.
But today, even that is not enough because modern communications means that everyone from those in the the high command bunkers down to the 'Tom' in the foxhole and 'the man in the street/bazaar/jungle/desert/shanty town is bang up to date with the latest news. What you do and what you say must be crafted with a world-wide audience in mind.
The paradigm (still largely accepted by Clausewitz) of “bipolar” wars fought between discrete states enjoying the support of their peoples has now been shattered by globalization. Popular support can no longer be taken for granted. “The people” are no longer homogeneous and the enemy is no longer a single entity. Further, “the enemy” is no longer the only actor to be taken into account. The information revolution means that every aspect, every incident of the conflict can be instantly broadcast throughout the world in width and in depth, and received by anyone with access to the internet; including the men in foxholes fighting it.
Off the top of my head I would suggest that we, meaning 'the West', have lost every war(*) since WWII with the exception of the one that evicted Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. In all cases the 'narrative' was confused and stood no chance against the multitude of contrary opinion available round the globe. It seems ot me that Mr. Simpson's book is required reading - 'SoD', please take note and remember it's my birthday next month!
(*) Of course, the 'officer class' tend to trot out the post-WWII Malaya campaign as an example of how we won but they forget that what won it was our surrender! In other words, as soon as we acknowledged that Malaya would be granted independence at the conclusion then the insurgency lost its main raison d'être.
WAR FROM THE GROUND UP: Twenty-first-century combat as politics
Gloomy 'Yerdy-Burdle-Durdles': I watched the first episode of the Swedish police story on BBC4 last night and went to bed even more depressed than usual. What is it, or, why is it, I wondered, that these Scandinavian 'Yerdy-Burdle-Durdles' always look so depressed and miserable? I mean, the story line was all about shooting high finance crooks so you would think there could be a touch of humour to be derived from it, but no, all the detectives in this special investigation squad continued to look as though someone had nicked the best bits from their smörgåsbord! Actually, I think I may have the answer to this Scandinavian mystery. Last week even I, your favourite 'Sunny Jim', began to feel distinctly gloomy and it was some time before I realised that it was probably this bloody-bloody arctic weather we have suffered not for days, not for weeks but for months! I am fed up with having to take about ten minutes to get dressed like an eskimo just to trudge through an icy wind to buy a paper. Of course, the estimated size of my forthcoming heating bill might have added to my misery. Oh, and the Scandi thriller failed to thrill. I'll give it one more chance next Saturday but if it doesn't cheer up then it's adjö!
Nippon No 1 . . .but No 1 what, exactly? Alas, dear reader, with the sort of efficiency which you have grown to expect from D&N I have mis-filed a report I saw during the week that provided a strategic over-view of the Pacific region. Recently I have become somewhat over-fixated on China and that has led me to ignore Japan. Big mistake because 'the times they are a-changin'' in Tokyo. A new government has introduced money printing as an economic tool which has led, naturally, to a devaluation of the Japanese yen which indicates a belligerent attitude towards what is beginning to look like a world-wide currency war. According to (my memory of!) this report there are also signs of an increase in Japanese military belligerency which is unremarkable given China's swaggering posture in regards to the South China Sea and the lunatic antics of 'Fat Boy' Kim in North Korea. Apparently many small nations on the Pacific rim actually want Japan to give up its non-aggression policy which has been in place since the end of WWII because they are looking for a counter-weight to Chinese hegemony. Watch this space . . .
Sir Edward Elgar . . . 'pompous and circumstantial' Edwardian toff and musician?
Nah! A deeply ambivalent man with a host of insecurities which, naturally, surfaced during his life and in his music which you may, just, detect if you listen to it carefully enough. Unfortunately, to fully detect the contradictions and the struggles within the man you need to be able to understand the language - music! I have mentioned before my deep regret at not having learned the two most important languages after English - music and mathematics! This personal deficiency of mine was embarrassingly emphasised by an excellent programme on BBC4 last week investigating Elgar's life in which various emminent musicians were filmed listening to his musical 'language' and obviously hearing things I could not detect. However, as a Catholic son of lower-middle-class parents born at the heights of the British Empire and in a society in which class was everything he had much to struggle with. In addition, he was a vain man - see the myriad of carefully composed photographs - and an intensely romantic one as well. Oddly, although his 'pomp and circumstance' music is taken as a musical portrait of the Victorian Empire and all it stood for there is throughout a vein of deep melancholy. A man worth studying but, dammit, I wish I could speak the lingo!
The lights are going out all over . . . er, my house, actually! And if I find the man responsible for fiitting all those smart, trendy lights that fit flush to the ceilings and which contain titchy little bulbs with two tiny metal prongs which have to be slotted into two equally minute channels which you cannot see, I will personally stick his fingers in a mincing-machine! In order to get at the dead bulb it is necessary to first remove the chromium 'thingie' which holds the fitting flush to the ceiling. In removing it, of course, you bring down half the ceiling - well, I do at any rate. Removing the old and inserting the new-fangled micro-bulbs is a test of intense concentration which must be sustained whilst standing on a wobbly step-ladder as the blood slowly but implacably falls down your arms leaving your hands and fingers looking like they will a day after you are dead! I am trying to convince the 'Memsahib' of the advantages of torches but so far . . . well, you can imagine!
I can't bring myself to write it: A few days ago I started to write a post entitled "I'm beginning to give up on America". I couldn't finish it, indeed, I had difficulty knowing where to start. And that was quite apart from the genuine pain and anguish in even attempting to marshall my thoughts. I simply cannot envisage a world in which the USA, with all its vices and virtues, was not around as final arbiter. I suppose British Edwardians living in the '20s and '30s felt much the same as they sensed the rapidly approaching demise of the Empire. I will not live long enough to see the full effects of the decline and fall of America - thank God. However, I will try and grapple with the subject later in a proper post.
Mark Steyn hones in like a guided missile: Happily, for you, I cannot improve on Mark Steyn's laser-guided wit which is impeccable even if the target was as soft and large as Maureen Dowd:
He who controls the language shapes the debate: In the same week the Associated Press announced that it would no longer describe illegal immigrants as “illegal immigrants,” the star columnist of the New York Times fretted that the Supreme Court seemed to have misplaced the style book on another fashionable minority. “I am worried,” wrote Maureen Dowd, “about how the justices can properly debate same-sex marriage when some don’t even seem to realize that most Americans use the word ‘gay’ now instead of ‘homosexual.’” She quoted her friend Max Mutchnick, creator of Will & Grace:
“Scalia uses the word ‘homosexual’ the way George Wallace used the word ‘Negro.’ There’s a tone to it. It’s humiliating and hurtful. I don’t think I’m being overly sensitive, merely vigilant.”
For younger readers, George Wallace was a powerful segregationist Democrat. Whoa, don’t be overly sensitive. There’s no “tone” to my use of the word “Democrat”; I don’t mean to be humiliating and hurtful: It’s just what, in pre-sensitive times, we used to call a “fact.”
OUCH! A direct hit!
You choose: Who would you rather be in a position of influence, an honest but dim teenager with a mouth, or to be precise, a tweeting finger, bigger than her miniscule brain; or Mr. Keith 'Vazeline' Vaz MP, a man who took payments as an MP but failed to declare them, a man who concealed payments from the Hinduja brothers via his wife's company, a man who made false accusations against a police officer and was suspended from the Commons, a man whose office expenses ranked 45th out of 647 MPs and whose second-home expenses ranked 83 out 647. Needless to say, he lives in Stanmore, a mere 45-minute journey into Westminster.
Read The Mail for the details of this young lovely who, in so many ways, stands for the contemporary 'youf' of this septic Isle and as an example of our wonderful nationalised edukashun serviss. The fact that she was placed in a position to be made a fool of is, of course, the result of the sort of soppy-daft, pc-non-think so beloved of our 'glorious leaders'.
This creepy-crawly politician is only stuck to the sole of my shoe because the mostly Asian voters of Leicester East are so dim they actually believe he is going to protect their interests rather than his own. What's "sucker" in Punjabi?
My rumbles for the day are now at an end - you will be glad to know!
Bank Holiday Mondays always feel like Sundays so I am continuing the Sunday Rumble format in which I will, from time to time during the day, ejaculate - look, I do the jokes round here! - sundry thoughts as and when they stumble into my mind. That means they will not be the usual beautifully crafted, highly intelligent, literate posts you expect on a normal day - and I won't tell you lot again!
The car washer test: There seems to be a great deal of fuss being made about Ian Duncan-Smith's so-called welfare 'reforms'. He has admitted publicly that they will not save a penny which, given that most politicians are lying liars by definition, gives me some small hope. However, what Duncan-Smith does claim is that his 'reforms' will manage the money more sensibly. I will offer you all, free of charge 'cos I'm generous like that, a simple test as to the efficacy of these 'reforms'. I make regular use of one of those car valeting services you see everywhere around these days, and yes, it is because I'm a lazy git who doesn't like getting his hands wet! I very much admire the boys and girls who work there, and do so with incredible energy in all weathers. I always make a point of asking where they come from. The answers cover just about every country in Eastern Europe. The only country never, not ever, mentioned is England! And how many Brit 'youfs' and 'youfettes' are in receipt of unemployment benefit, I wonder? When I see Brits working at these places I shall know that the 'reforms' have worked.
I told you, didn't I? A few days ago I provided you all with an audio link to a very shrewd American businessman who, apart from wanting to sell you his services, also spelled out exactly and precisely why the USA is well on its way to the knacker's yard. The Americans will owe around $20 trillion by the time Obama ends his reign and they will be utterly dependent on being able to borrow at the cheap rates they enjoy today because their dollar is still the reserve currency for much of the world's trade. Alas, that is already ending as more and more countries agree to drop the dollar and use their own currencies. I remind you of this because today the excellent Zero Hedge site is reporting that China and Australia have just agreed to ditch the dollar as the currency for their trade. This is all part of a Sino-Russian plan, already well on its way to completion, to form a trade bloc based on energy supplies with the sole aim of excluding the USA and, come to that, any of its usual glove puppets, ie, us! "The times they are a -changin'."
Footie fans: the truly brain dead: From the comfort of my own armchair with a constant supply of hot tea (courtesy of the 'Memsahib' whose hip is coming along nicely, thank you for asking, she no longer has to drag herself along on the floor which slowed up delivery recently) I have just watched Chelsea beat Man United on a freezing cold day. I suppose, just, that there is some justification to leave the comfort and warmth of your home, to travel sometimes hundreds of miles at vast expense and to pay ticket prices that will keep sundry "muddy-mettled rascals" in the millionaire styles to which they have grown accustomed, but surely having arrived there must be better things to do than just stand there chanting imbecilic slogans over and over and over again. Or is it their way of trying to prove to themselves that were they to submit to a brain scan the needle would move - just!
So farewell then, David Miliband, and good riddance! So 'Big' Dave slinks off to America to run a charity for a million quid a year because his sneaky little bro' nicked what he considered to be his political entitlement. Fair enough, I suppose, but today he also resigned as a director of the 'footie' club in his constituency because they have just appointed an Italian lout as manager who once expressed his liking for fascism. Well, David was shocked, I tell you, shocked and instantly made his feelings clear by resigning - whilst probably thanking the Lord he would never have to visit Sunderland again. Of course, had the Italian oaf expressed his support for communism, David would not have turned one of his well-groomed hairs despite the fact that communism has murdered roughly twenty or is it thirty times more millions of people than that dilletante Hitler. Perhaps the fact that his dear old dad had been a lifetime supporter of Stalin, a proper mass-murderer, had something to do with it.
Even The Economist puts global warming in the deep freeze: Thanks to Roger Simon at PJ Media I learn that the mighty Economist mag has dumped global warming:
OVER the past 15 years air temperatures at the Earth’s surface have been flat while greenhouse-gas emissions have continued to soar. The world added roughly 100 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010. That is about a quarter of all the CO₂ put there by humanity since 1750. And yet, as James Hansen, the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, observes, “the five-year mean global temperature has been flat for a decade.”
And someone must have opened the windows at their London offices because now they are quoting some Russian eye-ball swiveller predicting the freezing end of the world:
Russian scientist Dr Habibullo Abdussamatov, of the St Petersburg Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory, painted the Doomsday scenario saying the recent inclement weather [in Europe] simply proved we were heading towards a frozen planet. Dr Abdussamatov believes Earth was on an “unavoidable advance towards a deep temperature drop”. The last big freeze, known as the Little Ice Age, was between 1650 and 1850.
I may be crap at predicting American elections but I did warn all of you to 'go long' on Long Johns!
My trusty observers at NightWatch tell me that 'Fat Boy' Kim has placed all of his missile, rocket and artillery formations on the highest level of readiness which is a 'war imminent basis' and means they are capable of firing within minutes of receiving the command:
In the four Army Corps that are based north of the Demilitarized Zone, the North has deployed in caves and hardened positions about 10,000 howitzers, guns and multiple round rocket launchers with wartime loads of ammunition. The gun density per kilometer is higher than at the major battles on the Soviet Front in World War II and is, in fact, derived from Soviet artillery doctrine.
No-one seems to believe that he really wants war but explanations for his apparently lunatic behaviour vary. The shrewdest, I think, was a man on Sky News who suggested that his main aim was to attract the attention of President Aloof - ooops, sorry - President Obama and force him into one-to-one negotiations over a new settlement for the Korean peninsular. This, of course, will give Kim's reputation a tremendous boost and as any settlement will probably include large dollops of American aid for which North Korea is desperate, that will add even more 'lustre to his cluster'!
For once, Obama will be right to remain aloof. This is primarily a South Korean, Japanese and Chinese problem. Kim is like a batty old man living in a community who spends all day and night shouting obscenities at the neighbours and threatening to kill them all. It is up to the neighbours to decide amongst themselves what to do about him - they, after all, have most to lose.
In the meantime, of course, in such a state of high tension the possibility of some soldier somewhere along the border making a mistake and starting a war is a very great possibility.
I rarely urge my readers to do anything but in this case I am jumping up and down and waving my arms by way of encouragement - particularly if you are one of my American readers. What I want you to do, is settle down in a comfy chair with a cup of good coffee - and a very large Scotch - and spend an hour listening to a man with a tale to tell. He is American and also a businessman so, as you will have guessed, there is a sales pitch but happily that is kept to the very end and may be avoided if so desired. However, it is the first 50 minutes or so that is riveting and in which he describes exactly and precisely why the USA is rapidly approaching a major catastrophe that will dwarf the recent bank collapses.
It is, or should be, of major concern to us 'over here' because, as the old saying has it, 'if they sniff we catch a cold'. However, it seems almost inevitable that this time they are going down not with a sniff but with double pneumonia! The warning comes in the form of an audio presentation so all you have to do is listen - and gulp at your Scotch. The central premise is simple. The American government is printing dollars at eye-watering levels never before seen in their history. They are doing this in the confident knowledge that because the dollar is the world's reserve currency used by nations everywhere to conduct their business, there will be no ill effects from this money-printing exercise because the dollar will be in constant demand. Any minute now they, the American government, are about to find out that the dollar has ceased to be a reserve currency for the simple reason that nobody trusts it any more. When that happens you can say goodbye, America and hello, Zimbabwe!
The effects of a total crash in the value of the dollar on a heavily-armed American society facing an even more heavily-armed government do not bear thinking about. The gentleman giving the presentation has not convinced me of anything new because I have long festered on my suspicion that American national debt is unsustainable - and today, and for the foreseeable future, that debt can and will only get bigger. I hasten to add that this is not entirely the fault of the Obama administration, they are simply the last in a long line of 'spendaholic' governments. By the time Obama leaves office, most experts reckon the debt will have reached $20 trillion. There are many people in his administration who will be delighted at that state of affairs and look forward with revolutionary fervour to a breakdown in civic society when the bloated chickens come home to roost.
Already China is discreetly easing itself out of dollar holdings. They are doing it slowly because they hold too much to want to cause a panic. However what they, and many other nations are doing, is to set up currency agreements which will allow the participants to do their business in currencies other than the dollar. This alone will be enough to gradually devalue the dollar as you can see from this 10 year chart, courtesy of www.tradingeconomics:
Just look where it was ten years ago and where it is today. Think of it in reverse, like the water rising slowly and inexorably up inside the SS Titanic! It is in the nature of these things that it is only at the last minute that suddenly the water rushes in and the ship turns turtle in minutes. As for my own poor 'septic Isle' I would like to think that the great minds at work in our Treasury under the guidance of our very own wise and shrewd Chancellor of the Exchequer(!) are already surreptitiously getting out of the dollar, of which they own about 135 billion, and setting our nation up ready for the coming financial apocalypse - but I don't because they ain't!
A Grand Prix grumble: Having just watched the Malaysian Grand Prix I am now going into full 'grumpy-old-man-it-was-all-much-better-back-in-my-day' mode. You may be surprised that a man such as myself who has never, not even in my youth, taken the slightest interest in motor cars, should actually be somewhat taken with Grand Prix motor racing. But once, back in a previous life - I have several of those indicating a less than straightforward career path! - I attended several Grand Prix in my capacity as the boss of a Transit van towing a trailer on which sat a BRM racing car once driven by Jackie Stewart. Yardley, the fragrances company, had decided to move into the men's market with aftershaves and all that other ghastly, smelly stuff blokes splash on all over, and our job was to visit nearby cities in Europe and dish out leaflets and free samples before going to the track on Sunday. Of course, there have been huge changes in Formula One racing since those days -the ancient name of BRM will give you a clue as to how long ago it was - but one change stands far and away above all others - these days no-one is killed! Obviously this is 'A Good Thing' but the fact is that in some indefinable way it has taken an essential element out of the sport - a bit like drinking a dry martini without any gin. I tried to remember all the names of the drivers who died during the few years when I was a dedicated fan of the sport but I simply can't recall them all, well over a dozen, anyway. I'm glad they don't die any more but today it has become all too controlled and managed with pit-line bosses telling drivers how to drive. I'd like to have seen them trying to tell Graham Hill that!
I'm shocked Shocked is shocked! Even by my convoluted standards that heading is a corker of elliptical complexity, particularly if, like me, you have never heard of Ms. Michelle Shocked. This lady is, or was, the doyen of Left-wing idols 'over there' whose career was helped enormously by photos of her being arrested at various, er, 'right on' demos beloved of the American Left. But alas, Ms. Shocked opened her mouth and instead of squawking one of her tedious songs (no, I've never heard her sing but I just know these things, trust me!) she provided her audience with her opinion of gay marriage ending her mini-rant, according to The American Spectator, thus:
The folk-rock singer then joked, “If someone would be so gracious as to please tweet out ‘Michelle Shocked just said from stage: God hates faggots.’”
Cue the instant cancellation of the remainder of her tour. I'm shocked, I tell you, shocked!
U.S. crude oil production in the fourth quarter will exceed imports for the first time since 1995, as booming fields in North Dakota and Texas put the nation on track to surpass a quarter-century output record.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration, the research arm of the Energy Department, said domestic crude production will be 2 million barrels a day higher than imports at the end of 2014, as oil from outside the U.S. is forecast to drop late in that year.
“This projected change is primarily because of rising domestic crude oil production, particularly from shale and other tight rock formations in North Dakota and Texas,” the agency said in a “Today in Energy” note posted on its website.
Two thoughts occur: First, will Obama in his blunderingly stupid, anti-oil way contrive to turn the spigots off; and second, when will 'Dim Dave' drop his green trousers, bend over and take his punishment for spending zillions on utterly useless windmills instead of driving ahead with shale oil exploitation in the UK? Jest askin'!
Kerry is a Klot: Sorry, can't avoid corny alliteration, I mean 'clot', of course, and a potentially dangerous one at that. According to Jonathan S. Tobin at Commentary, Obama seems to have aquired some slight understanding of 'the bleedin' obvious' when it comes to the absolutely non-existent chance of an Israeli/Palestinian peace deal anytime in what looks like the next millenium! However, John Kerry, the new Secretary of State, is hell bent on writing his name in the history books for something other than telling 'porkies' about his service in Vietnam. The man sounds deluded and, given the nature of his 'jarb', downright dangerous, too!
I am grateful to my regular commenter, JK, for sending me a link to an article in the NYTimes written by Prof. Zheng Wang, an expert on foreign policy matters, particularly those of China. In it, he suggests that part of the problem with China's foreign policy is that it does not exist! Thinking about it and bearing in mind the last century or two in which, on good days, China was only a small and divided player in strictly regional affairs, adn on bad days, was a wrecked and raped plaything of much greater players on the international scene. Thus, it is hardly surprising that its sudden rise to global domination leaves it somewhat bewildered as it looks about it from on high and wonders what in hell to do!
Prof. Zheng indorms us that none of the members of the very top standing committees who rule China have any experience in foreign policy. In any case, he reminds us, their main, indeed, their imperative, concern is how to maintain 'Communist' Party control of a rapidly acquisitive population, that is, a population that seeks not only prosperity but also political power of a sort that is in direct opposition to the existing one party state. Naturally, the government will, from time to time, use foreign issues in the time honoured way as a means to whip up nationalist fervour, but mostly this is confined to 'neighbourhood' issues like control of the South China Seas.
When it comes to grand strategic plans for China's place in a global context there appears to be a vacuum! This is dangerous in that we have already suffered with the USA blundering from one folly to another and no clear idea on direction or purpose. The thought of a totally inexperienced China doing the same does not bear contemplation. Rather sensibly, they appear to be aware of their shortcomings and - for the moment! - they are not exerting themselves in any one particular direction. However, as a wise man once said, "Stick around, you ain't seen nuthin' yet!"
Honestly, the BBC should come with a government health warning! Driving home today - after my usual early morning swim - God I'm good! - I heard the news presenter say that today was the United Nations' World Happiness Day. I very nearly drove off the road! Apparently, this prize collection of crooks, thieves, murderers and rapists believe that on one day a year governments should concentrate their thoughts on what they can do to make their citizens happier - and, no, mass suicide on their part is not an option. Even so, and in line with my policy of always trying to be helpful and positive, they might like to make a start by questioning the delegate from North Korea because, according to my faithful observers at NightWatch, 'Fat Boy Kim' is taking his hobby of 'playing soldiers' to an extreme degree. The whole country is close to being on a maximum 'war footing' basis as his military undertake nationwide exercises which means that all production and distribution of food stuffs for the civilian population come to a halt. Reports from The Daily NK:
[C]onfirm that a partial mobilization of manpower has occurred since 11 March, unlike any in a long time. The only work teams still functioning are those devoted to goods for the armed forces. Production teams that make goods for civilians are participating in or are supporting the training.
Food allocations are based on production output by workers. Closure of a production line for military training terminates food allocations for the workers on that line. Mobilized workers are fed by the army but their families at home must fend for themselves or receive special allocations from the government or pilfered food from the army. The contacts in North Korea report serious food shortages among the families of the mobilized workers, some of whom have threatened protests. In one major city on the China border, the government made a special allocation to avert a riot.
Doesn't sound like life is a barrel of laughs in North Korea and I wasn't surprised to hear another report on the radio to the effect that huge numbers of North Korean children are showing signs of debilitation and illness due to malnutrition. If anyone deserves a dose of malnutrition it's 'Fat Boy Kim'!
Sorry about the even-more-peurile-than-normal heading to this post but the military temperature is rising on the Korean peninsular. According to my trusty, old warriors at NightWatch the bellicosity from the North Koreans has reached levels not seen since 1988. Not only have they unilaterally abrogated the ceasefire set in place at the end of the last Korean war but now their government-controlled media are ratcheting up the sense of crisis amongst their own people, warning them of imminent war. 'Fat Boy' Kim has paid an official visit to the artillery units which fired on the off-shore Islands owned by South Korea a few years ago. The NightWatch boys and girls reckon that the North Koreans will now be in a high state of readiness for war with all ICBMs loaded and ready to fire on the word of command.
Meanwhile, back in Beijing, the silence is deafening! I cannot believe they are happy about the possibility of a war - especially a nuclear war - breaking out on their borders. The leadership in China maintains its political control via the constant increase in trade and wealth shared amongst its people. If that is disrupted and zillions of Chinese suddenly loose jobs and incomes they have become used to, the government will quickly be in trouble.
The problem with 'Fat Boy' Kim's antics is that there are too many actors involved - in the two Koreas, in Beijing, in Washington and Tokyo, and thus the chances of mistakes and misapprehensions increases hugely. However, perhaps now, people will realise the dangers of loonies being allowed to 'go nuclear' - and they do not come much loonier than those in Tehran - except possibly in Pyongyang!
Like old men everywhere I am constantly warning of troubles to come but the good news is that my forecasting skills are, shall we say?, negligible verging on downright incompetent - yes, that sums it up nicely! Perhaps it is my daily 'intrep' from those shadowy chaps at NightWatch that is giving me increasingly bad vibes from the 'People's Democratic Loony-bin' that is North Korea. Under the leadership, if that is quite the word, of 'Kim Bill-ee-Bun-ter', the fat teenager who allegedly runs the asylum, North Korea has poked its greatest supporter, the Chinese, not in one but in both eyes by firing off an ICBM and then letting off an A-bomb. The Chinese appear helpless to control this teen-age hooligan and therefore those who might be seriously damaged by his yobbish behaviour, the South Koreans, are beginning to look hard at defending themselves:
South Korea: Joint Chiefs of Staff spokesman Army Major General Kim Yong-hyun warned on 6 March, "If North Korea carries out provocations that threaten the lives and safety of South Koreans, our military will carry out strong and resolute retaliations."
The South Korean statement advised that if provoked by North Korea, the South would attack the North's 'command leadership.'
Meanwhile, Japanese obsevers have noted that the North Korean authorities have begun camouflaging civilian lorries, buses and cars, an activity that could indicate the possibility of war. However, the North Koreans are adept at ratcheting up tension in order to win concessions and this might just be another example of it. However, Kim Jong Un is a very young man whose domestic position is not entirely secure and one wonders if he has the skill to ride the one-wheeled bike without falling off - and taking a few million people with him!
That stands for 'Rest In Hell' as we bid farewell to yet another stupid, thuggish clown, a type of political gangster of which South America appears to have a surplus. I suppose the most good you can say of him is that he wasn't quite as bad as some of the worst but only by a matter of degree. Still, he gave us all - well, me, at any rate - a good laugh by swallowing Left-wing propaganda, especially that of Michael Moore's film "Sicko" - to the effect that the Cuban 'Castro-Care' health service was "the envy of the world" (to quote a phrase!). As I pointed out in a previous post, if he had accepted the offer of treatment from Brazil he might well have beaten the cancer that took him. Well, never give a sucker an even break, I say, and I just hope it was a long, lingering and excruciatingly painful ending.
A depressingly accurate editorial in this week's 'Speccie' (no link to the editorial) entitled "Little Britain". Perhaps 'Miniscule Titchy Britain' might have been even more accurate. The writing on the wall, or perhaps, the writing down of our armed forces, has been evident since 'Dave' cut the defence budget but simultaneously increased the Foreign Aid budget by exactly the same amount. What bullets will not achieve, apparently bedpans and blankets will! Anyway, it is now clear that it is not just that Britain has no appetite for foreign adventures/projecting power (you choose!), the fact is that today we are incapable of it. The French, with a little help from their friends(!), managed to fly a few troops to Mali in order to shoot up some 'Fuzzie-wuzzies' who quickly ran away but who, once reorganised, now appear to be coming back. In the meantime, nos chers alliés, having run out of real bombs, were forced to drop concrete bombs during their recent Malian campaign. And 'Dave', with all the dexterity of a card-sharp, has now reversed his earlier policy by ear-marking part of the Aid budget to the military. By jingo, it's this sort of clear, decisive thinking that has got us where we are today!
We're fucked, the French are fucked, NATO is fucked - and Obama doesn't give a fuck! He, of course and not without cause, is fed up with defending Europeans who refuse to cough up a reasonable amount of dosh for the service provided, and anyway he has turned away to face what he considers to be a truly grand strategic problem - China. Given the potential riches already flowing from shale oil, his interest in the Middle East is also waning. If Europe is still highly dependent on Arab oil then, he will let it be known, let them take on the burden of providing the security for it. It is now clear beyond doubt that he has no intention of lifting a finger to stop Iran gaining nuclear capability. All those many Europeans and Brits who moaned and groaned about 'irresponsible American adventurism' now have what they wished for. Let's hope they enjoy it!
Please don't misunderstand, I'm not knocking quiet times, I like them - boring is good in my book, especially when it applies to international affairs. But still, somehow, in some way, it don't feel right!
Take Europe for example. Nothing has changed fundamentally, half of them are flat broke, they haven't managed to take even faltering steps towards unification, and yet the markets seem supine. Sky News are running some adverts for a forthcoming report on conditions in Spain and the other 'Mediterranean' countries and they are truly appalling. Whole families sitting linked arm to arm round their homes in an effort to thwart the bailiffs coming to repossess them. I do realise that it is necessary to take statistics from such places with due caution but on the other hand all reports indicate massive youth unemployment of the sort that set off revolutions in countries on the southern side of the Med. And yet ... and yet ... I read somewhere in the last few (for me, hectic!) days a report based on polling evidence that although the populations concerned - Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Irish - are on the rack, support for remaining inside Europe and the euro is still strong. Apparently they are all terrified of reverting back to their own currencies which is, of course, their only real chance of prospering again reasonably quickly. They might not like the German boot on their necks but they are prepared to shut their eyes and kiss it!
Meanwhile, over on the other side of the globe - thank God! - the North Koreans are proving yet again that the loonies are in charge of the asylum, first firing an ICBM and then letting off a nuclear firework. Happily, for the moment at any rate, this seems to be more of a Chinese problem than anyone else's - although South Koreans and Japanese might think differently! It is now crystal clear that either China is unable to control N. Korea, or, is secretly quite happy for them to kick sand in the face of their opponents who are mostly China's opponents as well. My trusty 'intel operators' at NightWatch sum it up thus:
US and Allied deterrence measures have prevented war for six decades, but lately have had no measurable influence in deterring North Korean provocations, preventing the development of nuclear weapons and missile delivery systems or in stopping sales of North Korean missiles and conventional weapons to Pakistan, Iran, Syria and Libya. The US also has shown itself recently to be slow or unable to respond to provocations in a timely fashion. As a result, the new North Korean leader seems less intimidated by the US than were his forbears.
China cannot or will not restrain North Korea. [My emphasis]
What is even more worrying is that the pompous, ignorant and arrogant dimwit in the White House appears to have no concerns and instead concentrates what passes for his mind on how to spend more and yet more dollars he does not possess on utter futilities like so-called 'green industries'. Even if 'sequestration' does not occur in a few weeks, he still intends to slash and burn defence spending whilst he diverts funds towards the Democrat voters of America. In the meantime, North Korea either sells to, or advises on, nuclear weaponry and delivery systems to every enemy of the USA, Iran being one of the first in the queue. Back in Washington, 'Mr. Smug 'n' Mighty', with his nose raised, concentrates on delivering ponderous speeches concerned almost totally with American domestic politics. He is Wilson and Roosevelt combined.
A few posts down I drew attention to Putin and his 'thugocracy' as they hammered yet another harmless opposition blogger. Obviously when it comes to applying the full force of the state against the hapless and the harmless, the security police apparat suddenly finds reserves of efficiency. Needless to say, when it comes to actual large - and I mean eye-wateringly huge - crimes that severely damage the state, they are too busy beating up bloggers!
The amount of dirty money flowing in and out of Russia has more than doubled over the past eight years, robbing the country of productive capital and driving a massive underground economy, a new report has found.
Global Financial Integrity, a Washington think tank that studies illicit money flows, estimates that an average of $61.72 billion in money earned from corruption, human trafficking, arms smuggling and other illegal activities has entered or left Russia each year since the start of 2004, a 228 percent increase from the $27.06 billion in illicit funds seen annually on average in the prior decade.
This sort of thing is like a slowly metastatizing cancer in a society. Slowly but irrevocably it spreads through the system weakening and in the end destroying the sinews of state. Given that this is Russia and it's Putin's regime, then good luck to the crooks, I say!
Still, Russia only ranks fifth among developing economies for total illegal money flows, far behind China, which GFI estimates has lost $3.79 trillion between 2000 and 2011.
China saw an estimated $764.27 billion in dirty money between 1994 and 2011, GFI said in its report "Russia: Illicit Financial Flows and the Role of the Underground Economy," released on Tuesday.
The dirty money feeds a massive underground economy, equivalent to 46 percent of Russia's national economic output and 3.5 times more than the average for other major industrialized nations in the Group of Eight.
The shadow economy fueled by illicit flows enriches a small business and criminal elite at the expense of the broader citizenry, and it flourishes because Russia's government institutions are weak, with corruption and accountability measures worsening, GFI said.
And no, I am not referring to non-existent global warming. Instead, I give you, courtesy of the WSJ, the latest example of Putin's iron fist, this time covered carefully in a velvet glove! - not, I hasten to add, that this is due to any delicacy on his part but more because of his desire to avoid bad international publicity in the run-up to the 2014 Winter Olympics. So, a certain Mr. Sergei Udaltsov, apparantly a constant critic of the Kremlin, has been ordered into home detention and forbidden to contact the outside world:
Speaking before the order was issued, Mr. Udaltsov called it the latest in a series of small steps that the Kremlin hopes will pass unnoticed in Russia and the west but that are silencing Russia's opposition.
The order will last until April, pending the outcome of a criminal investigation against Mr. Udaltsov for allegedly plotting to incite mass unrest.
"It's the same as if I were in a jail cell, but for the authorities this doesn't look as bad as if they threw me in jail," said Mr. Udaltsov, who said it would effectively block him from any political activity.
He is but the latest and will certainly not be the last. Putin and his apparat in the Kremlin truly are a disgusting bunch of mobsters. The only good thing to be said about them is that their blatant gangsterism is inimical to the growth of Russian strength and progress. Instead they are constructing a corrupt, shaky, inefficient edifice likely to collapse sooner rather than later due to - irony alert! - its 'internal contradictions'!
But of course, some 70+ years on when traitors are unmasked, everyone shrugs and mutters, "Alger who?" or "So what?" before changing the subject. Almost no-one pauses to cogitate upon the possibility that if it was like that then, why wouldn't it be like that today? Even so, a recent book [1], reviewed in The American Spectator, undertakes the unpleasant task of raking the muck that surrounded and infected the government of FDR during WWII. The authors retread the path laid bare by the Venona Project in which the American and British intelligence services combined to decrypt tens of thousands of messages sent by the various Soviet agencies. The result was to bury a lance of truth into the Leftist myth that Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White were patriots, the Rosenbergs were innocent and that Whittaker Chambers was a liar. It is now indisputable fact that the exact reverse was true. Even more, the deeply unpleasant Sen. McCarthy was, in essence, right and the equally unpleasant Richard Nixon was right to defend Whittaker Chambers. All those attending the Yalta Conference were either knowingly or unknowingly dancing like Russian puppets as Stalin jerked their strings. To be fair to Roosevelt, which he barely deserves, he was by this time in failing health and was thus well and truly in the manipulative hands of the likes of Harry Hopkins. Thus, half of Europe was handed over, bound and gagged, to a monster. To those, like Enoch Powell and Andrew Alexander, who maintain that the Cold War was totally unnecessary I can only suggest that 'there is none so blind as them wot is determined not to see'! If Stalin could have grabbed more of Europe he would have done - and he worked hard enough at destabilising both Italy and France to say nothing of the Berlin blockade.
Today in the USA, the Left have no need of foreign powers to assist in their planned destruction of their democracy. They subverted the main organs of society decades ago and thus today they have the overwhelming support of the MSM, the universities, most of the professions, a gargantuan - and growing - civil service and, via the schools, the hearts and what passes for the minds of the young. Home run, really!
1: Stalin’s Secret Agents: The Subversion of Roosevelt’s Government By M. Stanton Evans and Herbert Romerstein (Threshold Editions, 294 pages, $26)
Needless to say, in the finest traditions of this blog that title has very little connection to the content of this post except that it is concerned with the warning words of Herr Jens Weidmann,' ze boss of ze' German Bundesbank and therefore a man of whose opinion on financial matters one should take seriously. And he, himself, is being very serious according to the FT which reports that Herr Weidmann is concerned that politicians are increasing their efforts to subvert the independence of their central banks with the aim of bringing about a devaluation of their currencies in order to give their nations a distinct advantage in the competition for overseas markets. You might call it 'the Lance Armstrong effect'! He points the finger at Hungary and Japan but warns that it could spread.
Mario Draghi, the boss of the European Central Bank needs to be watched like a hawk because one suspects that the likes of 'Mr. Rompoy-Pompoy' would love to shove his hand up the back of Draghi's beautifully cut Italian suit and pull his levers! Meanwhile, I can't wait to bid good riddance to Mervyn King, our useless and compliant Governor of the Bank of England who had about as much fight in him as a soggy sandwich! Now all eyes are on Mr. Mark Carney, the most famous Canadian since, er, well, I can't think of any famous Canadians, who is about to take over at the BoE. He shouldn't have much trouble slapping those posh public schoolboys into place but how will he stand up to 'Bruiser' Balls in a couple of years time?
Suffice to say that even the possibility of a global exchange rate war makes me shiver!
Well, why not? After all, Sen. Chuck Hagel was only a sergeant in the Vietnam war and I was a corporal - substantive, mind! - in the British army at roughly the same time, even if I was idling my time away living amongst the fleshpots of Singapore whilst he was up the sharp end in Vietnam earning serious medals. And anyway, now that he, as a putative Republican, has been chosen by President Obama to be the next Secretary of State for Defence then as far as I am concerned he has assumed the character of one of those targets they used to hoist up at the end of our firing range at which I used to waste quids worth of ammo as my shots went everywhere except near the picture of a charging enemy infantryman at which I was supposed to be aiming! Of course, being of a peaceable nature myself I would not do this without provocation but the fact is that just about everyone and his uncle are taking potshots at poor old Chuck. He must feel as though he's back in Vietnam.
The puzzle of the Chuck Hagel nomination for defense secretary is that you normally choose someone of the other party for your cabinet to indicate a move to the center, but, as the Washington Post editorial board points out, Hagel’s foreign-policy views are to the left of Barack Obama’s, let alone the GOP’s. Indeed, they were at the fringe of the entire Senate. [My emphasis]
So what’s going on? Message sending. Obama won reelection. He no longer has to trim, to appear more moderate than his true instincts. He has the “flexibility” to be authentically Obama.
According to 'The Kraut', there are three main areas of policy with which to judge Sen. Hagel's approach. The first, is military spending which is scheduled to go under a $600 billion scalpel, a policy vehemently opposed by Sen. Hagel's predecessor which might have been the cause of his early demise. But 'Sgt.' Hagel, having looked at the army from the bottom up, knows the unbelievable amount of waste and profligacy, to say nothing of kick-backs and profiteering, that goes on inside a defence budget. So in this he may be right, as Mark Steyn makes clear in The National Review:
But beyond the politics is a real question. He’s [Hagel] not wrong to raise the question of Pentagon “bloat.” The United States has the most lavishly funded military on the planet, and what does it buy you? In the Hindu Kush, we’re taking twelve years to lose to goatherds with fertilizer.
Something is wrong with this picture. Indeed, something is badly wrong with the American way of war. And no one could seriously argue that, in the latest in the grim two-thirds-of-a-century roll call of America’s un-won wars, the problem is a lack of money or resources. Given its track record, why shouldn’t the Pentagon get a top-to-toe overhaul — or at least a cost-benefit analysis?
Quite so but I can't help wondering how much of baby will be thrown out with the bath water, by which I mean, the really slick technology required for research and development of the very latest in weaponry costs zillions even with Scrooge in charge of the Pentagon. The Chinese have zillions, not in cash terms but in science graduates prepared to work for peanuts provided they get a flat in one of those empty modern cities that litter their landscape. What I'm trying to say is that if government is hopeless at running over-spent budgets which at least produce the goodies in the end, how efficient will they be at cutting back budgets without ending worthwhile research projects?
The second Hagel policy item ' The Kraut' concentrates on is Israel:
The issue is not Hagel’s alleged hostility but his public pronouncements, his refusal to make moral distinctions, for example. At the height of the second intifada, a relentless campaign of indiscriminate massacre of Israelis, Hagel found innocence abounding: “Both Israelis and Palestinians are trapped in a war not of their making.”
I'm not sure one can afford "moral distinctions" in international affairs but whilst the Israelis no doubt have much blood on their hands it as nothing compared to the corrupt, vicious and self-perpetuating war policy of the Arab regimes which they have maintained as a means to maintain themselves. That has now failed and even worse collection of loonies is in charge of their various asylums. There is also a real-politik argument in favour of supporting Israel, particularly now. The new Islamist regimes will hate us whether we support Israel or not, so we might as well keep the Israelis going for as long as possible in order to keep otherwise idle and mischievous Arab hands and minds busy. It is an Obama-rish fancy that playing 'nicely-nicely' with your sworn enemies will somehow placate them. Read some history, Mr. President, and you, too, Sen. Hagel!
Thirdly, of course, comes Iran, and 'The Kraut' spells it out:
Hagel doesn’t just oppose military action, a problematic option with serious arguments on both sides. He actually opposed any unilateral sanctions. You can’t get more out of the mainstream than that.
He believes in diplomacy instead, as if talk alone will deter the mullahs. He even voted against designating Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization.And most tellingly, he has indicated that he is prepared to contain a nuclear Iran, a position diametrically opposed to Obama’s ostensibly unalterable opposition to containment in his first term. What message do you think this sends the mullahs?
And that’s the point. Hagel himself doesn’t matter. He won’t make foreign policy. Obama will. Hagel’s importance is the message his nomination sends about where Obama wants to go. The lessons are being duly drawn. Iran’s official media have already cheered the choice of what they call this “anti-Israel” nominee. And they fully understand what his nomination signals regarding administration resolve about stopping them from going nuclear. [My emphasis]
Mark Steyn makes more or less exactly the same point but adds in a gloomy assessment of the future in the first half of the 21st century:
The rest of the world can see coming the Pentagon downsizing — and the inevitable, commensurate decline of U.S. power. Pacific Rim countries will have to rethink reliance on the counterbalance of the U.S. Navy and consider acquiescence to Chinese regional hegemony. Arab countries will understand that the current rapid decline of post-Kissinger U.S. dominance in the region is not cyclical but intended to become permanent.
Hagel is a man of no independent stature. He’s no George Marshall or Henry Kissinger. A fringe senator who left no trace behind, Hagel matters only because of what his nomination says about Obama.
Meanwhile, in The Spectator, Andrew J. Bracevich, turn his fire onto the Chiefs of Staff themselves. He is amused by General Martin E. Dempsey, the COS Chairman, who continues the Pentagon custom of holding regular strategy meetings in which all the 'brass', with plastic booties on their shoes, stride around a map of the world painted on the floor of an enormous room deciding on their strategy for this or that eventuality which he describes as "a made-for-Kubrick set-up" inviting hilarity and scorn. I'm not so sure of that. Generals are supposed to think of the strategic threats to their country. In fact, if the COS had done a little more of it, as well as doing it better, in the 1930s they might have been better prepared for the 1940s! But Mr. Bracevich will not have it:
Yet Dempsey’s map hints at the dirty secret that members of the fraternity of strategists, civilian and military alike, are loath to acknowledge. The formulation of strategy begins by assuming away complexity, reducing reality to a convenient caricature. Strategic analysis is almost by definition dumbed-down analysis. To conjure up solutions, you start by simplifying the problem.
Reading his essay I decided that what Mr. Bracevich is really complaining about is not strategic thinking but poor strategic thinking! Well, we'll all drink to that, especially the poor old 'Grunts' and 'Toms' who get left with the job of putting it into action. But that sort of 'conclusion' does take you very far. Von Schlieffen, von Moltke the Younger and the entire German General Staff went in for arguably the greatest exercise in strategic thinking the world has ever seen, even down to the intervals, measured with Prussian exactitude down to minutes, between hundreds of trains moving across Germany in 48 hours. Six weeks after the war they started, they lost - even if it did take them another four years to own up!
Anyway, all those of you (and there are a few not a million miles from my regular commenter, DM!) who pray for a docile America kept so busy turning swords into plough-shares that it will quietly ignore the rest of the globe going to hell in handcart may be about to live your dream. Let's hope it doesn't turn into a nightmare!
Yes, yes, I know, cod Shakespeare (sorry Will!) but today I have a huge, 'gi-normous' dollop of irony, enough for me to surfeit on for weeks! You see, that 'solitary, nasty, (Leftish), brutish and short' little thug who runs Venezuela (sorry, Hobbes, old chap!) is dying of cancer in a Cuban hospital. Truly now it may be said that 'El Presidente-Comisario' Chavez is dying for his beliefs. Being (allegedly) a true red Marxist he has swallowed whole the lying lie, which was helped on its way round the world by the lying liars' lying liar of choice, Michael Moore, that Cuba's socialist health service is terrific, one might almost suggest that it has taken over from our very own, dearly beloved Nationalised Health Service as being "the envy of the world". The fact, of course, is that the Cuban health service is total crap,as reported by Investors.com:
Cuba by contrast, remains substandard, with average Cubans forced to bring their own bandages, water and sheets to hospitals that haven't seen repairs in years.
Recent reports say Cuba cut medical spending from $209 million in 2009 to $190 million last year — "bending the cost curve" by giving less care. Sound familiar?
When Chavez was first diagnosed with cancer he was offered the services of the Sirio-Libanese Hospital in Sao Paulo, Brazil which is considered to be a world leader in cancer treatments.
His expected demise will be entirely due to his gullibility to leftist propaganda and bad choices that came of it.
"In July 2011, during (a)... summit in Caracas, Brazil's President, Dilma Rousseff, told a few of her colleagues — in private — that Chavez was likely to die as a result of 'his excessive paranoia rather than as a consequence of his serious — yet treatable — cancer,'" wrote Venezuelan consultant Pedro Burelli in a newsletter.
"What she meant to say," Burelli added, "was that by choosing secrecy in Cuba over medical competence at the Sirio-Libanese Hospital in Sao Paulo (where she had been treated successfully for lymphatic cancer) Chavez had condemned himself to a shorter life."
Perhaps he was conned by Michael Moore's 1998 propaganda film, Sicko, which praised 'Castro-Care' to the heavens. If so, it is obvious that one lying liar couldn't spot another even if they were both together on a desert island!
As Chavez suffers through four surgeries in Cuba, it's instructive to note it was the Brazilian hospital — a teaching institution with top-of-the-line tomotherapy equipment, 2,000 doctors, and a record of success for beating cancer — that cured Rousseff as well as then-President Fernando Lugo of Paraguay. But it gets no recognition from the likes of Moore, who still promotes CastroCare on his Web site, while ignoring the private U.S. hospitals the Brazilians model themselves after.
To be fair, Chavez is far from being the worst of South American gangsters masquerading as national saviours but even so, he had choices and he took one - and you know what those beastly American gringos say about giving a sucker an even break - "Never"!
In all the New Year broo-ha-ha I forgot to share my amusement at the annual release of classified documents under the 30-year rule. This year, of course, it covered, amongst other things, the Falklands war, or perhaps, now that we know what went on, we should rename it 'the Washington war'! Dr. Tim Stanley, an English history prof who specialises in America, wrote a summary for the Daily Telegraph. According to the prof (who looks about 14-years old!), Mrs Thatcher, as she was then, quickly learned that "the special relationship is only special when it's convenient". This was made clear when the Americans told her that they felt the need to inform the Argentinians of the forthcoming British landings on South Georgia in order to maintain their stance of neutrality. Of course, they assured her, they would only do this at the last possible moment so as to avoid British casualties but . . . Well, needless to say, out came the handbag with the lead weight in it and perhaps Reagan felt that, on the whole, being shot was less painful! I frequently bemoan the useless, when not actually harmful, activities of our very own 'Ministry for Foreigners' but the American State Department reminds me, constantly, that it could be worse. Were there really educated, knowledgeable, sophisticated people at the highest level of American foreign affairs who thought that tipping off the 'Argies' to our landing, even at the last moment, would do anything other than utterly rupture the Atlantic alliance? Every British casualty, fairly or unfairly, would have been laid at the door of a treacherous White House and an alliance that had lasted through two world wars would have ended instantly. Was that really worth being thought well of by a bunch of drunken, debauched, Argentinian thugs dressed in ridiculous uniforms and well past their sell-by date, General Haig and Mrs. Kirkpatrick?
Mind you, whilst it is easy - alas, all too easy - to deride the many imbeciles who inhabit American governments we should not forget our very own. By a sheer fluke we had the most outstanding prime minister since Churchill but just pause and consider what might have happened if that doddering, old fool, Michael Foot, had been running the country - yeeeees, quite! And also, before we lay into the (so-called) American elite with our base-ball bats, let us pause and raise a glass to the memory of (Sir) Caspar Weinberger, a man who could definitely see the British wood for the Argentinian trees!
Well, after 30 years, it's all "blood under the bridge" but as Dr. Stanley reminds us, it behoves British statesmen to keep a very clear eye open when appraising likely American responses to this or that. What we do not need is the sort of moon-calf love exhibited by 'Dim Dave':
Alas, whenever David Cameron takes a romantic break in Washington DC, it’s truly love that we see in his eyes as he hangs on Barack’s every word. Some of us will never forgive him for describing the UK as America’s “junior partner” during the Second World War. Given how much an Eton education costs, you’d have imagined that Dave would’ve paid a little more attention in history class.
According to two newspaper reports I have read, Benjamin Netanyahu is losing popularity in the run-up to the forthcoming election. Of course, he is still going to win but given the vagaries of the Israeli proportional representation system he will, as always, have to share power with one or two minority parties. His problem is that the particular party growing in popularity at his expense is even further to the Right than he is! He, and all of Israel, now know without a doubt that they no longer enjoy the support of the White House. Even worse, they now know that the always somewhat mythical 'Jewish lobby' is a busted flush. American Jews continued to vote for Obama despite his hostility to Israel. As one wiseacre (I forget who) put it, the vast majority of Jews in the USA are second or third generation away from the Holocaust and they are now far more Democrat than they are Jewish. Oddly enough, in reading about Anne Frank (see previous post) an American Jew who wrote a play about her was quoted as saying that he had spent eighteen months in Israel and hated every minute of it!
There is now little doubt that Iran (with a little help from its North Korean friends) will not only possess a nuclear capability but also a means to deliver it. Netanyahu has played a mean game of bluff poker so far but if his power is to rest in the hands of politicians even more nationalist than him then he may be forced to put up or shut up! Who would want to be a small, independent, democratic country whose threatened defences depend utterly on Barack Obama? Hmmmn, perhaps that's a question we should be asking ourselves!
NOTE: I'm not sure whether it's MS8 or TypePad but now, everytime I write a post, it automatically offers up linked articles. I will try to pick out relevant ones but of course I have not necessarily read them. There you are, you lucky people, all part of the excellent service you enjoy here at D&N!
I confess immediately that when it comes to North Korea I rely utterly on those shrewd fellows at NightWatch who kindly sent me their overnight assessment of the New Year speech given by Kim III. (There have been three Kims running the dump since WWII and to avoid confusion, well, I get confused at any rate, I will number them.) There has been a minor flurry of excitement in the MSM for two reasons. First, that Kim III actually gave a live New Year speech at all because his father, Kim II, never did. However, my 'NightHawks' tell me that the reason Kim II never spoke was because he had a high-pitched woman's voice that might actually have raised a few laughs in that miserable dump of a country! The other reason for excitement was a mention in the speech of an end to confrontation with South Korea. However, my 'NightHawks' assure me that it was almost an afterthought in the speech and was only mentioned as an adjunct to Kim's urgent encouragement to the workers to produce a badly-needed economic miracle! That is likely to have been met not by giggles but by yawns (in private, of course!) because when do political leaders ever stop encouraging workers to work more?
The bulk of the speech concentrated on real matters, or real-politik, if you like, in that Kim III has obviously cast his lot in with the Party rather than the military. The people were urged to put their confidence and their weight behind the Party which was, is and will forever be the supreme arbiter of the nation's affairs. All those hideous, emaciated, be-medalled generals with their ridiculous ex-Soviet hats which are big enough to land a helicopter on, had better watch out. Or perhaps plump little Kim III should watch his step even closer! Anyway, the 'NightHawks' sum it up thus:
The message to the outside world appears to be a plea for forbearance while domestic issues get settled. Kim's detractors do not share that view. They think that provocation and tension promote the safety and security of the North Korean state.
Sounds like 'interesting times' - and we know what their Chinese neighbours say about that!
Well, that's how it seems to me these days but perhaps it is just a result of me going slower! Anyway my sense of acceleratinging time has been increased by reading an old favourite of mine, Tom Bethell, in The American Spectator (TAS). I have admired him for more years than I, or he, probably, care to remember. Back in the BC era - that's 'Before Computers', by the way - I used to subscribe to the print version of TAS and Bethell was one of their regular contributors. Being something of a contrarian myself, how could I fail to admire a writer who told us that Einstein's relativity theory was nonsense!? Also, he is British by birth although he has lived in the USA since 1962 and took citizenship so one received from him a somewhat more detached view of affairs 'over there'. He has just written a muse on his past fifty years in 'The Great Republic' beginning, of course, with the Cuban missile crisis which now appears so historic it is positively cobwebbed! His recollection is tinged with the sort of sardonic commentary I always enjoyed:
I now realize that the missile threat was serious, more so than we knew at the time. By comparison, today’s scares, most of them masquerading as science, should be seen as campaigns to increase funding for various government agencies. Man-made global warming is only the best-known example.
After a short period teaching in Virginia he moved south to New Orleans to indulge his love of traditional jazz. Driving through Georgia and Alabama he worried that he might be mistaken for yet another white 'agitator' operating on behalf of the burgeoning desegregation movement for which, at the time, he had little interest:
My interest was in traditional New Orleans jazz, as exemplified by musicians like Bunk Johnson and George Lewis. My biography of Lewis was published by the University of California, and I made some recordings of the era’s surviving musicians, since reissued on CD. But sadly my interest in this art form coincided with its abrupt decline. There are still good reasons to visit New Orleans, but local jazz isn’t one of them. My politically incorrect thought: All the best black music in this country, and there was a lot of it, was created in the era of segregation.
When I later saw what happened to American popular music—tumbling from ragtime to the idiocies of rap in less than a century—I have been dogged by a sense of decline. Classical music, ditto: Bach to Bartok. Where’s the improvement? It’s all downhill.
Oh dear! Signs of 'Grumpy Old Man' syndrome appearing but it is difficult not to agree with him:
Perhaps that helps explain why I don’t believe in evolution. Things don’t evolve; they peak quickly and inconspicuously, then they fall apart. When I left England in 1962, it was already declining and had been doing so for decades. I have the same concern about America today—who doesn’t after the recent election? It’s hard to say how these things should be measured, but government’s share of national production gives a rough estimate. National decline seems to be the equivalent of organic aging.
As an outsider he tended to see more of the game, or at least, he saw it with a more detached eye, perhaps:
I became an American citizen at the same time and learned to drop the condescension that so many Brits adopt toward the United States. I also noticed the automatic anti-Americanism of the liberals. Watergate! Everyone was saying what a crisis it was. If so, why were they so gleeful? Ditto America’s defeat in Vietnam. They quietly relished that, too.
Liberals adopt a perpetual fault-finding mode about their own country. For a while I kept quiet about this, lest I sound like a right-winger. Maybe, I now think, a quota of liberals should be exiled for two years to see how they like it somewhere else.
He has seen the complete collapse of organised communism in the sense of national entities controlling satellite countries but he is sharp enough to see it in its new face - liberalism (in the American sense):
What of Communism today? As a party program with satellite countries, millions of “apparatchiks,” and a queen bee in the Kremlin, it is dead. But American-style liberalism is its remnant and it lives on in its dishonest way. [Whittaker] Chambers was surprised by the widespread support for [Alger] Hiss among intellectuals and within the U.S. press corps, even though few of them were ever members of the Communist Party. He saw that the winds of fashionable opinion were against him. Progressive dreams had far more appeal than free-market realities, as they still do today.
What do modern leftism (American liberalism) and communism have in common? Both are godless and egalitarian, but liberalism has “evolved.”
Communists wanted to kill off capitalism, for example, but liberals know it must be preserved—in a highly taxed and regulated form. It must be permitted to create sufficient wealth to redistribute to favored groups—single mothers, minorities, college professors—if the system is to keep Democrats in office. Liberals want market outcomes to be “predictable.” Appeals to envy and blame heaped on the rich can also be used as a bludgeon, as Obama has shown.
Of course, in their hopes that they can 'command and control' capitalism, Leftists will eventually be as disappointed as their doctrinaire progenitors, Marx and Lenin. To attempt more than setting up a framework of law based on the sanctity of private property and contract is to invite in corruption at all levels and sooner or later the golden goose ceases to lay any golden eggs - as the Chinese will discover in due course unless they change their ways. Incidentally, Bethell insists, correctly, that Chinese economic power does not necessarily mean that China is an enemy, indeed, just the opposite, Chinese wealth is of benefit to us all. However, as an American citizen and as a student of American affairs, he should remember that such wealth and power does encourage a tendency to interfere here, there and everywhere on the grounds that it is a 'national interest'. Britain in its days of empire set the example!
Looking to the fairly immediate future, Bethell sees the rise of technology, of China and of Islam dominating world affairs but admits to the impossibility of foreseeing any exact details. Tom Bethell is an intersting man and an excellent writer and his article is worth a read. In the meantime, of course, the clock is still ticking - and I swear it's ticking faster!
Actually, don't bother because you began losing your liberty before WWI, you lost a whole lot more after WWII and now, in the era of the 'United States of Europe' with the Global Government of the United Nations hovering in the wings merely awaiting its entrance, you have no liberty at all! Instead you have a chimera called democracy, invented by the political class and constantly waived before your eyes in much the same way that pick-pockets distract your attention before pulling your wallet out of your backpocket. Or perhaps a more suitable metaphor would be to imagine that you have been tempted by a lover into indulging in some S&M practices, and as the manacles and handcuffs appear to be made of fluffy, pink fur you agree to be bound, and then discover that the whips and lashes are all too real. That, it seems to me (and to others much more intellectually able than me) seems to be the situation we find ourselves in today.
It may come as a surprise to some of you that there is a choice between liberty and democracy; that one, so to speak, precludes the other. Surely, you might reply, they are more or less the same thing. If that is your response then truly, like an addict, you are utterly lost to the controlling power of your neighbourhood drug dealer! The Founding Fathers of the United States understood exactly and precisely that liberty and democracy are inimicable foes which is why you will find no mention of the word 'democracy' in either the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution of the United States. The framers understood, as we do not, that rule by the majority is inherently dangerous. Thus, in their Bill of Rights the only 'right' they have been granted is the right to trial by jury. The remainder of the 'rights' listed are protections for the citizen against encroachment by their government. Like us 'over here' who relied on English Common Law as our defence against state interference, the Americans enjoyed a little over a century of liberty, and democracy was hogtied by the immensely cunning contradiction of powers written into the Constitution which stopped any one branch of government gaining over another despite so-called 'popular acclaim'.
Then, with grim inevitability, or so it seems in retrospect, along came the 20th century and the Age of the Masses. It was the masses who fought the wars and who were mutilated and killed in their hundreds of millions and with their increased political strength of numbers deployed via universal suffrage they demanded new 'rights' and the political class, seeing their chance, seized the opportunities to pour forth a torrent of benefits which, irrespective of any longterm good or harm they might cause, possessed the inestimable virtue, in the eyes of the political class, of ensuring their re-election. Needless to say, those rare politicians with longer vision and a broader intelligence who saw the inherent dangers were swept aside by the 'popular vote', or, if you prefer an old cliché, the charge of 'the Gaderene swine'!
To all intents and purposes there is today no real organised opposition to democracy. Rule by the majority, or the masses, if you prefer, is well and truly entrenched. The effect, of course, is that there is no longer any real difference between the main political parties, they simply compete to promise ever more benefits without ever explaining that eventually these will have to be paid for. Even when a financial disaster hits the world's economies and nations, like ours, deeply in debt for promises made when times were (allegedly) good, still jib at taking back the 'goodies' bestowed on the masses for fear of electoral punishment. I sense, and perhaps it is merely a flight of fancy on my part, that there is the beginning of an inchoate unease amongst part of the electorate - mostly those who pay through the nose for the political classes to indulge themselves and their clients - who sense the truth that the political class is not divided between Labour/Tory or Republican/Democrat but is, itself, a monolithic entity that considers itself not part of the nation but above and beyond the nation. So attractive are the benefits of being part of this political class that the need for yet bigger, wider and higher forms of government is essential to cater for all those wishing to jump aboard the bandwagon, hence the birth and growth of malignacies like the European Union.
Undoubtedly I shall return to this subject - and whether you consider that a threat or promise I do not know!
The geo-political and strategic plates are shifting beneath our feet. In global terms I have lived virtually all of my life under the American ‘umbrella’. It has cost me, or to be exact, my country, a fortune. Americans as individuals are by nature a generous people but their governments are as tight-fisted and ruthless as any mafia loan-shark demanding his 'vig' - or else! So, the 'umbrella' has only come at a heavy price and we have been left diminished by it. However, in my opinion we would have been even more diminished by lack of it. I know that many highly intelligent and much more distinguished thinkers than me, from Enoch Powell onwards, have urged us to politely give the 'umbrella' back and quietly disassociate ourselves from what they see as the constant folly of American foreign policy. They point derisively at what they call the blunders of Korea, Vietnam and Iraq. Powell, in particular, maintained that the entire ‘cold war’, with its huge conglomeration of American-led NATO forces was based on a totally unfounded fear of Soviet invasion into western Europe which was never a possibility. And, needless to say, they rubbed in the fact that when we needed some American ‘tea and sympathy’ over the Suez Canal, the various efforts we were making to leave our colonies and, finally, the invasion of the Falklands, the Americans were not just disinterested but sometimes hostile.
Much (but not all) of that is true but, I would maintain, only a partial truth. I do not intend here to argue the ins and outs of each of those scenarios. Nor do I wish to deny that the greater some powers are, the greater the blunders of which they are capable. The history of my own country when it became the first global power is too full of such foolishness for me not to recognize it. So, since 1945 America has stumble-bummed its way around the world, doing good here, not so good there and positively badly somewhere else. So far, so normal! We can all admit it whilst bearing in mind, which many of us do not, that if certain other nations had been the global power of the past 70 years it would have been almost totally bad everywhere! A simple thought experiment will demonstrate the truth of that proposition: imagine if the Prussian loonies who ran Wilhemine Germany had actually won WWI, conquered the whole of Europe, dominated the Middle East and taken over whole swathes of Africa – what sort of world would we have ‘enjoyed’ then? Dwell on that thought for even a few minutes and suddenly America doesn’t seem that bad!
And all of that leads me on to the indisputable fact that the American ‘umbrella’ is slowly but surely being furled and put away. Perhaps a more accurate metaphor would be to say that having been held up for so long in so many rough conditions it is now exceedingly threadbare, worn and holed and now – there is no money and, more important, no will to repair it! Some, out of woeful ignorance, will celebrate and I would simply remind them to beware what they wish for. Others will celebrate out of sheer malignancy and the joy of future prospects. I am uneasily aware that much of what I have written is more than somewhat airy and theoretical, so allow me to point you to the very down to earth, or to be precise, down to sea level, writings of ‘Sir Humphrey’, stoutly holding the ‘Thin Pinstriped Line’.
Yesterday he wrote an analysis of what can only be described as the decline and fall of the US Navy. It is well worth reading although you may require Wiki to decipher some of the acronyms. He concentrates on the business end of the US Navy – their aircraft carriers. The other day I repeated the news that for the next several months there would only a single carrier Task Force in the Gulf. This more than anything should convince Netanyahu, if he isn’t already following the several less than friendly meetings with the President of his principal 'ally', that Israel is on its own should they attack Iran’s nuclear capabilities. That, if you like, is an operational detail but ‘Sir Humphrey’ reminds us that if you look harder you will see a much greater underlying deterioration in US Navy capabilities:
On paper from next week the USN will operate 10 aircraft carriers, all NIMITZ class, after the USS ENTERPRISE is decommissioned. In reality those 10 vessels are going to be thinly stretched across the globe. Right now, of the 10 hulls, Nimitz is undergoing repairs, three are forward deployed (two are in the Gulf, one is in Japan) and another is available for tasking in the US. One (Abraham Lincoln) is available, but is about to enter deep refit for refuelling, while two more are in deep refit or being refuelled, with a further two in minor refit. As of today, the US Navy has just three operational deployed aircraft carriers at sea, with a fourth available in the US if required, and this is unlikely to change before summer 2013. (A good source of information can be found here - http://gonavy.jp/CVLocation.html)
The worry is that these sorts of availability problems will continue to grow as the class gets older. Make no mistake, these are some of the most complex and capable warships on the planet, but they are also getting old. Three of the hulls have now been commissioned for over thirty years, and another two for over twenty years. Although designed for an optimised 50 year lifespan, it is likely that as they age, maintenance is going to be increasingly difficult and availability will suffer.
Although a replacement class is now under construction, only one has been ordered so far[my emphasis], and the deep budget cuts likely to hit the DOD over the next few years means that it is by no means certain that further orders can be guaranteed in time to generate replacement hulls on time. This is a grim situation and it’s likely to get worse before it gets better.
In the light of the recent presidential election you will now see why I stressed earlier that apart from lack of money there is no will for defence spending so there is no imperative for Obama to consider anything other than more and deeper cuts; and the carrier force, despite its huge power, is eye-wateringly expensive, not just in capital costs but in manpower – the crew on each ship, not counting the air wing, exceeds 3,000 people! In future, overseas operations, assuming(!) that the USA is prepared to undertake them, by American forces will require the close proximity of land air bases to provide the necessary cover for the fleets to operate in safety. Obtaining air bases from foreign governments will only prove successful at a hefty political as well as a financial price. A further incentive for Washington to withdraw inside ‘Fortress America’! ‘Sir Humphrey’ sums it up, thus:
The ability of the USN to operate with impunity across the globe, steaming where it wanted on its terms, and able to stand its ground against almost any aggressor has gone forever. Todays’ USN remains a fiercely capable and strong navy, but its ability to exert unlimited and unchallenged control of the high seas has gone, probably forever. Instead it would be more realistic to judge that the future USN will provide a capability to deploy power into some areas, but only at the cost of reducing capability and influence in others.
I am, as always, deeply indebted to those ‘hawk-eyes’ from KGS NightWatch who produce a daily ‘intrep’, er, ‘for my eyes only’, of course! Actually, it could be for your eyes, too, if you click on their site and sign up for their reports. Anyway, today they have been summarizing the results of the last eight days of mutual rocketry between Israel and Gaza. It confirmed my gut feeling that not much has changed.
Of course, both sides have learned a great deal about their various weapons systems. The Israelis now know just how effective their ‘Iron Dome’ anti-missile system is, but so does Hamas! Equally, Hamas, and Israel, have learned the capabilities of Hamas's new longer range missiles and their chances of actually bringing down heavy fire onto Tel Aviv. One point that NightWatch do not raise but I do, is the deeply personal knowledge of each and every leader of Hamas that at any time and without warning Israel can send a drone straight through the sunroof of their car or the skylight in their house. That personalizes matters exceedingly and might help to concentrate minds!
According to NightWatch, the massing of 75,000 Israeli troops on the border was always a bluff because the Israelis knew that an invasion of Gaza was a waste of time and effort and Israeli soldiers's lives and would achieve nothing. However, the action that has taken place should assure Netanyahu and his party a good win in the forthcoming elections, an objective not far from their minds, I guess!
Further into the future the outlook for Israel is grim:
So what just happened? After eight days of rocket and air attacks, both sides can declare victory of a sort. That is not a good outcome for Israel. The situation is much more complicated and ominous than in many decades.
Israel smoked out and degraded, for now, significant new Hamas capabilities to attack Israel. In assembling the target intelligence, Israel confirmed details about the volume, periodicity and nature of Iranian support to Hamas. It also learned Hamas' reaction time for retaliating with long range rockets plus the range and accuracy of those rockets.
It also learned that the rocket capabilities improvements would not be possible without Egyptian complicity, if not outright cooperation. This bodes ill because longer range and more accurate rockets and even short range ballistic missiles are almost certain to show up in the future inventory of Hamas. With help from Iranian Revolutionary Guards Qods Force operatives, Hamas rocketeers will get better. They are already better than they were in 2008.
Something else the Israelis learned, or more likely, confirmed, is that as far as President Obama is concerned they are on their own should they attempt to take out Iranian nuclear capabilities. The Americans have reduced their aircraft carrier strength in the Gulf to just a single task force instead of the three that would be needed to support an Israeli strike on Iran.
As for the US, the Israeli tail wagged the US dog and the US responded with political backing and promises of more military aid. The US also announced that only a single US aircraft carrier task group would be on station in the Persian Gulf region through the winter because of "mechanical problems" on the USS Nimitz.
Most Readers will know that US combat operations in the Middle East usually require three aircraft carrier task groups. The presence of a single carrier task group is peacetime combat readiness.
This means that the price of US support for Israel's counter-attack on Iran's proxy in Gaza this November is that Israel is on its own should it decide to attack Iran before next spring and beyond. The single carrier is a signal to Israel that the US does not intend to help militarily. [My emphasis]
Israel succeeded in degrading Hamas' immediate capability for firing rockets into Israel. Israel achieved nothing permanent, however, as long as Iran remains a reliable arms provider for Hamas. ALL that Israel can do is knock down Hamas and Israel has to keep at it regularly.
The other key player in this wretched game is Egypt. Its leader has “strutted his hour upon the stage” posing as a ‘peace-keeper’ but he is situated uneasily between two contrary forces. His Muslim Brotherhood supporters are urging him to support Hamas whilst his army, dependent as they are on American military aid, advise him to stay as neutral as possible. His people, meanwhile, want bread not guns and as they have shown already they are capable of making their feelings known in dramatic ways. NightWatch summarise the whole situation thus:
Hamas and Iran learned the limits of Israeli power, confirmed Israel's reluctance to take casualties [by not invading with ground troops], learned details about the saturation point for Iron Dome, and learned about Israeli retaliation capabilities.
This eight-day war is, thus, a turning point because Hamas, like Hezbollah in Lebanon, has proven it can strike at the heart of Israel and still live to tell the tale. This is a breakthrough tactical development. From now on, Israel is on the defensive and the threat will get worse unless a secular revolution occurs in Iran.
Egypt is at a crossroads between cooperating with the US to receive essential US military and economic assistance and following the core beliefs of the Muslim Brotherhood. The Egyptian government of President Mursi will try to do both.
Egypt has no capability to stop arms smuggling into Gaza. It has no ability to guarantee a Palestinian ceasefire. Hamas itself has no ability to guarantee a ceasefire. It does not speak for Islamic Jihad or a score of other, smaller fighting groups.
The ceasefire will be violated, but for now the signatories to the agreement will insist the ceasefire is intact … until supplies are replenished. [My emphasis]
So, there you have it, several reasons not to be cheerful, er, have a nice day!
It’s hard enough predicting the future but it’s just as hard predicting the outcome when the future becomes the now! I confess to suffering severe ‘gobsmack’ when I read the editorial in the current edition of The Spectator(no link to the actual piece). The opening paragraph gives you your first smack – unless you are an energy expert:
For decades, America has dreamed about becoming self-sufficient in terms of energy, and ending its reliance on unsavoury Arab regimes. Now this dream seems within reach. The International Energy Agency this week forecast that America is undergoing a fuel revolution, and that it will overtake Saudi Arabia to become the world’s biggest oil producer by the end of this decade. [My emphasis] By 2035, America should be able to meet all of its own energy needs. Energy prices are already plummeting and global manufacturers have started to pullout of Europe and relocate to the southern states to cut bills. An economic miracle is on the way.
This arises from the enormous and so far barely tapped shale oil fields from which oil and gas can be extracted by 'fracking', the use of water under immense pressure. I confess immediately my inability to work out the full implications of this. The Spectator helps by reminding us that the US Navy spends $80 billion – I’ll repeat that, shall I? - $80 billiona year patrolling the sea lanes in the Gulf in order to protect the free flow of oil. How long they will keep that up when they have no need of the wretched stuff is anyone’s guess? Of course, we will still need it, as will the Europeans, bedeviled as we are by a Green lobby whose stupidity is only exceeded by its wickedness. Thus, we will be spending more and yet more on ridiculous and mostly useless wind farms and other fantasies from the ‘Green Fruitcake Fraternity’ as they do everything in their not inconsiderable power to stop any efforts to exploit the shale oil reserves in Lancashire which are lying there like a golden lake.
Still, it’s an ill wind that fails to blow off someone’s hat and give us all a laugh so two sets of rascals will feel a chill. Obviously some of the worst regimes in the Middle East will come under enormous pressure as revenues drop, most especially, Iran. Also, that nice Mr. ‘Pouty’ Putin, who live off the hog of petrodollars flowing in from the Caspian could slowly but inexorably find himself – and his people – reliving austerity times just when the Russian people were beginning to enjoy the ‘Good Life’.
Meanwhile, according to The Spectator, international companies are ‘up and offing’ to America to take advantage of cheap energy whilst ‘Dim’ Dave remains wedded to soppy Green policies that will ruin us all. It is no consolation to know that the Germans are in an even bigger bugger's muddle over energy policy than us! In the meantime China will take full advantage of lower energy costs and grow even more powerful so we must be grateful that if the USA does not turn fully socialist it should be able to keep ahead of China.
No doubt there are other eventualities and I just hope that in the West there are some clever and sophisticated geo-strategists working them out. Well, a man can hope, can't he?
And so it goes on . . . and on . . . and on. Any attempt to delve into the history of this conflict in order to work out the whys and wherefores is doomed to a slow death similar to being sucked down into a swamp. Of course, if you are parti pris as a supporter of one side or the other then suddenly all is clear and there are no doubts, no uncertainties and you stand firm on your foundation of hate. A prime example comes from Steve Bell, the 'cartoonist' for The Guardian. I place doubt-filled inverted commas around the word 'cartoonist' because he barely qualifies for a title that implies entry into a group of usually intelligent, perceptive, witty and talented men capable, at their best, of summarising a situation in a picture that does indeed say more than a thousand words. All Bell can come up with on this subject is a thuddingly tendentious illustration of the old Jewish puppet-master shtick of which the late Joseph Goebbels would have been proud.
From, thank God, the outside looking in, it seems to me that the Jews lost their argument for a homeland some 2,500 years ago. Great shame and all that but some you win, some you lose! It was, in my opinion, an act of sentimental folly to attempt to set up a new Jewish homeland in the midst of an Arab continent. The Jews, despite their protestations, have no right to a homeland until they can point to some supreme being who has granted this 'right'. Alas, Jehovah doesn't cut the mustard with people who believe in Allah or Jesus and their Gods, or those with no Gods at all!
Even so, we must deal with the situation as we find it and the Jews, against all the odds, have succeeded in setting up their homeland. It's there, it exists and that's the reality. The 'Arabs', by which I mean all the non-Israeli Middle East, will never rest until Israel ceases to exist. Actually, to be more accurate, I should refer to the 'Arab leaders' because I do not doubt that the so-called 'Arab street' is a lot less bothered by Israel than it is by the obvious failures of their own governments to actually govern sensibly. The governments concerned, of course, continue to whip up the Jewish problem in order to deflect attention away from their own misdeeds. In the meantime the Jews continue to fight for their existence which is entirely their right so to do.
There are only three possible outcomes to this saga. First and most likely, the 'war' goes on and on ad infinitum and ad nauseum! The second is that the 'Arabs' find some new and increasingly painful problems of their own that will force them to re-arrange their priorities. For example, the chances are that over the next 20 years and onwards the price of oil will drop dramatically as plentiful shale oil and gas becomes available to the West and the Far East (ie, China). A drop in oil revenues will have huge consequences in the oil states. The third possibility, an unlikely one but you never know, is that the Jews lose the 'war' and the State of Israel ceases to exist. The brain-dead but hate-filled pro-Palestinian mob (I can think of no other more suitable collective noun) in the West, led by the likes of The Guardian and its untalented 'cartoonist', who urge the Palestinians on to even greater efforts to destroy Israel never spell out what would happen in that event. The answer is simple - some 7.5 million Jews - men, women and children - will be exterminated. It will make the holocaust look like a tea party. And lo, there will be rejoicing in Islington!
I am uneasily aware that having started my keen observations of the 'Mysterious Kingdom Polit-Bureau-dom' I have allowed my attention to stray back 'over there'. Sorry and all that but 'over there' is so much easier to try and understand then 'all the way round there', not least because the former, being more than just scrutable, are hopeless at keeping secrets whilst the latter wouldn't tell you if your zip was undone! Anyway, I do remember that the Central Committee was supposed to be having a grand 'how's-your-father' this month in which all the new, hand-picked candidates would take their seats at the high table whilst trying not to show that it had all been fixed months ago. This morning, in a comment thread somewhere down below, the subject of China arose and I realised that actually I had read nothing about this hugely important meeting in any of the MSM for some considerable time.
Happily, George H. Wittman of The American Spectator was to hand with a useful essay explaining, as best he could, what was going on, or to be precise, why nothing was going on - yet! Remember, it is quite an extraordinary event when the very pinnacle of the ruling Communist Party of China appears to stumble - even slightly. If the Party machine coughs, how sick is the body politic? Anyway, first of all, Mr. Wittman reckons the Bo Xilai affair (click on my 'China' category for details) has taken much longer to sort out than originally thought. He was not a troublesome loner but the leader of a Maoist movement intent on taking China back the 'good old days'. There's "nowt as queer as folk", as they say north of the M25, and just as large segments of the Russian population revere 'good old Uncle Joe' despite the fact that he murdered them in their millions, so too, in China the greatest mass murderer of all time is still held in high regard. Anyway, one casualty appears to be a certain Zhou Yongkang, hitherto the top man in charge of Chinese internal security. He 'agreed' (yeees, quite!) to relinquish his main responsibilities half a year earlier than his retirement date. Such apparently trivial detail is all you ever get out of Beijing's hall of mirrors.
Even more mystifying is the absence (Not terminal, I trust, Comrade?) of the heir apparent, Xi Jinping, who has not been seen in public for weeks. He was supposed to be hosting seriously important talks with the military leadership for reasons which can only be guessed at. Mr. Wittman reports that perhaps serious surgery has intervened and that might have been the cause of the unprecedented delay in the Central Committee meeting which is now due to take place in November. China and its government faces some gigantic and unbelievably complex problems. The new Central Committee could either lurch to the extremes or remain more or less centralist. Loud-mouthed denunciations by American presidential candidates will not help. "Softlee, softlee, catchee monkey" must be the guiding principle!
ADDITIONAL: A note to my Headmaster, 'DM'. Please, Sir, don't bother, I have already started the hundred lines for the howler in my title and I have changed "of" to "off" and I blame 'SpecSavers'!
It is rather ungracious of me, I know, because only today I received a friendly comment from a Mr. John Gardner who appreciated reading a blog that was not rude about Mitt Romney - and now I am going to be rude about Mitt Romney! Sorry, but "truth will out". And no-one spells out economic truths better than Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek. I have not heard the presidential debates in full, only the excerpts on TV and the written commentary. However, one thing I keep picking up like a monotonous rhythm, is an anti-Chinese shtick which is decidely alarming because it comes regularly from both candidates! Once again, it seems, we are hearing the dim, dumb clamour of fear and loathing from the Great American Public (GAP) and it is being played upon by Obama and Romney, each attempting to wave the flag higher and more vigorously than their opponent.
Obama may be forgiven because he is, at heart, just another political shyster, this time one hiding behind what I suspect is a totally fraudulent academic record which provides him with a veneer of intellectualism - to the brain dead, that is! Romney, on the other hand, knows better, or should do, and thus his efforts to outbid Obama on how "tough" he's going to be with China is fraud of the highest, or lowest, calibre. As Boudreaux puts it, much better than me:
Each man insists that America’s economy can be harmed by inexpensive imports – in other words, harmed by opportunities for voluntary exchanges that lower Americans’ cost of living.
By promising to raise taxes on Americans who buy Chinese-made goods, Mr. Romney again promised to break his campaign promise to not raise taxes. That he is unaware of the contradiction isn’t promising.
Thus, the GAP (just like their British counterparts from time to time) are encouraged to support a politician who will increase their cost of living by banning cheap imports! I mean, would you vote for such a thing ? Oh! You did once - sucker! - how old were you?
Mr. Obama is no better. He bragged that he “saved a thousand jobs” with his “tough” trade action that – by raising taxes on Americans who buy Chinese-made tires – ensured “that China was not flooding our domestic market with cheap tires.”
By this logic, the President’s policy is inexcusably lame. If creating more jobs in U.S. tire factories justifies forcing consumers to pay higher prices for tires, the Obama administration should also outlaw the sale of used tires (which, like low-priced imports, are “flooding our domestic market”). Indeed, the president should seek legislation mandating that all rubber used to make tires be non-vulcanized. The resulting decline in tire durability will create even more jobs in U.S. tire factories by “protecting” our market from being “flooded” with cheap tire durability – that is, with tires that last for tens of thousands of miles before needing to be replaced.
If it was just economics (or 'freakonomics' more like) perhaps we might forgive them but their swaggeringly aggressive attitude goes dangerously beyond cheap Chinese imports. They are whipping up a war scenario. This time, to the surprise of my readers, I will quote no less an authority than Prof Paul Krugman, er, this is the earlier Paul Krugman, the one who appeared to possess considerable intelligence until he put it down somewhere and forgot it:
I believe that if the rhetoric that portrays international trade as a struggle continues to dominate the discourse, then policy debate will in the end be dominated by men like [protectionist author of The Trap, Sir James] Goldsmith, who are willing to take that rhetoric to its logical conclusion. That is, trade will be treated as war, and the current system of relatively open world markets will disintegrate because nobody but a few professors believes in the ideology of free trade.
And that will be a shame, because for all their faults the professors are right. The conflict among nations that so many policy intellectuals imagine prevails is an illusion; but it is an illusion that can destroy the reality of mutual gains from trade.
In my poor, meagre opinion, Sino-American relations are going to be absolutely critical during the first half of the 21st century. The sort of huckster boasting and bragging engaged in by both candidates will be watched with close attention in Beijing and may come back to haunt them - and us!
I am obliged to my regular commenter, 'Back of an Envelope' (who I wish would choose a more succinct psuedonym!), who points me in the direction of the ineffable Richard North who has written a post on the incipient corruption lying at the heart of our MoD High Command to which I drew attention in the preceding post. In the course of his post, Dr. North introduces us to Col. Harry D. Tunnel IV, an American officer of, shall we say, very decided views as to the operational policy in Afghanistan, in general; but in particular, to the utter uselessness (in his view) of Maj. Gen. 'Nick' Carter, British Army, and his superior at the time - circa 2009/10. Here they are:
You may read Col Tunnel's views (if you are up to taking on military jargon!) courtesy of Michael Yon, surely the very best war correspondent of his era, here. In essence, according to Col. Tunnel, Carter is an ineffectual tosser unfit to command a latrine work-party. You see, Col. Tunnel thinks that what armies are actually for, when you strip away the BS, is to kill people - mostly the enemy but if a few civilians get in the way, well, hell, that's war! There is considerable merit in Col. Tunnel's, er, robust views and in any normal war between conflicted armies his notion complies with Lanchester's Square Law of Attrition which states, in simplified terms, that if you can kill more of the enemy over time than he can kill of you, then the rate of difference will increase exponentially and you will win - all other things being equal! (Ah, yes, military strategists have learned a thing or two from the second-hand car trade when it comes to weasel words!)
But of course, the campaign in Afghanistan is not one of two armies facing off against each other. It is one, clod-hopping, stumble-bumming army (because that is the nature of all armies everywhere) facing a more or less hostile population who, whilst they might hate each other for sundry tribal and/or religious and/or political and/or business reasons (usually the latter!), are combined in their desire for all foreigners to fuck off and leave them alone. In so far as I can understand it, Maj. Gen. Carter's operational inspiration arose from a desire to make nicely-nicely with the civilians and by holding the roads open at all times to allow trade to flourish thereby winning friends and influencing people. To which I can only ask - where do they find these little innocents? And why do they put them in charge of armies? Col. Tunnel is entirely right to suggest that putting troops into static positions guarding roads is simply to offer perfect targets for the enemy. And who in hell actually likes any government, let alone one held in power by foreign troops?
Now, in the unlikely event that Maj. Gen. Carter reads this from ex-Cpl. Duff and complains, my answer is simple - just look at Afghanistan - NOW - TODAY - after years of all your clever, subtle strategies and tactics! You lost, Carter, but so did you, Tunnel, you poor man's John Wayne! The pair of you should have taken one look at the country, and another look at recent history, and then told your bosses in Washington and London that there was absolutely no chance of ever running Afghanistan. If they failed to listen to you then you should have put the lives of your men before your rabid desire for higher rank - and resigned!
The only operational plan that might have achieved some success should have been applied years ago when you should have wrecked the country's infrastructure (not a long job!) and departed, leaving a letter on the presidential desk telling whoever it would be who would eventually run the cesspit country that they had better behave because we know where you live and we can send a missile straight through your front door if you don't!
As I slump here in a state of trauma, still trembling from the experience, let me again offer my thanks to the invaluable Cafe Hayek who drew my attention to a shocking - shocking, I tell you! - piece written by Paul Krugman. If you are a soppy, 'Graun'-reading Leftie with a bleeding-heart conscience over the low wages and cruel conditions of workers in the Third-world, then read no further:
And as long as you have no realistic alternative to industrialization based on low wages, to oppose it means that you are willing to deny desperately poor people the best chance they have of progress for the sake of what amounts to an aesthetic standard--that is, the fact that you don't like the idea of workers being paid a pittance to supply rich Westerners with fashion items.
Crikey! That could have been written by Milton Friedman but I never imagined that Krugman could have allowed such sacrilege to flow from his keyboard. Mind you, it was written in 1997 and thus Prof.Krugman shows us yet again what a singular man he is. Where the rest of us started life believing and spouting rubbish until the school of hard knocks taught us differently, Prof. Krugman began by being emminently sensible and has now declined to economic peurility. But here is another taste of his truer wisdom:
The lofty moral tone of the opponents of globalization is possible only because they have chosen not to think their position through. While fat-cat capitalists might benefit from globalization, the biggest beneficiaries are, yes, Third World workers. [...]
Workers in those shirt and sneaker factories are, inevitably, paid very little and expected to endure terrible working conditions. I say "inevitably" because their employers are not in business for their (or their workers') health; they pay as little as possible, and that minimum is determined by the other opportunities available to workers. And these are still extremely poor countries, where living on a garbage heap is attractive compared with the alternatives.
And yet, wherever the new export industries have grown, there has been measurable improvement in the lives of ordinary people. Partly this is because a growing industry must offer a somewhat higher wage than workers could get elsewhere in order to get them to move. More importantly, however, the growth of manufacturing--and of the penumbra of other jobs that the new export sector creates--has a ripple effect throughout the economy. The pressure on the land becomes less intense, so rural wages rise; the pool of unemployed urban dwellers always anxious for work shrinks, so factories start to compete with each other for workers, and urban wages also begin to rise.
You may read via the link - and I urge you to do so - Prof. Krugman's entire article written for Slate in 1997. What can I say, except perhaps to quote good ol' Luke:
I say unto you, that likewise joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons, which need no repentance.
Come back, Brother Krugman, and all will be forgiven!
He opened his mouth and let his belly rumble: Thus spake, not Zarathustra, but that bumptious little twat, Andrew Mitchell MP. In his, by now, infamous, foul-mouthed rant against sundry members of the Plod whose particular duty at the end of Downing Street is to protect the lives of Mr. Mitchell and his ilk even to the point of giving up their own lives to do so, he inadvertently confirmed what many of us had suspected that, despite an education so expensive that it could have kept several dozen immigrant families on welfare for life, he is, himself, as thick as a plank. To mouth off at length and at considerable volume at the end of Downing Street, an area only exceeded in its density of hacks by the nearest Westminster pub, was as stupid as shovelling shed-loads of tax-payers' dosh (or my dosh, as I fondly think of it) as aid payments to their poor and destitute to places like India where they are busy building their first nuclear bomb. This he did with considerable vigour and actually had the brass nerve to boast of it! It seems to me that with him and Dave and George as examples, one must fervently support the return of Grammar Schools, not just to rescue the, er, "plebs" from the wasteland of Comprehensive Schools, but also the gentry from their obviously rotten but expensive Public Schools where they appear to learn nothing.
When I take over American foreign policy from 'HillBilly': I may well shoot myself! Conducting the foreign policy of a great power is the nearest you will ever get to playing three dimensional chess against a quantum computer - and if that isn't random enough you can throw in a large dollop of human nature, too. It is, of course, tremendously easy to criticise Secretaries of State - which is why I do it so frequently - and it is even easier to do so after the events with which they have had to struggle. At the moment no one knows who will be conducting American foreign policy over the next four years but who ever it is, he or she has my sympathy. To take but one area of massive complexity and huge danger, consider the Pacific rim in general and the South China Sea in particular. Chinese determination to claim sovereign ownership of various, mostly uninhabited islands, has already begun to provoke hostility and fear amongst its neighbours. A new Chinese leadership is about to take over and they are all too well aware that pride, perhaps over-weening pride, has been aroused in the Chinese population which expects its government to do whatever it takes to enforce China's claims. However, the government is also well aware that the Chinese people are rapidly approaching hard times. The fantastic rush to riches of the past 20 years is coming to a halt. In the old days, dirt poor peasants just did what they were told but there is no one more furious than a newly-enriched bourgeois suddenly facing impoverishment. America, of course, will be watched and judged by the smaller nations of the Pacific rim as to how it faces up, or faces down, Chinese ambitions.
This man is thick enough to be a politician: I give you what's left of Mr. David Villalobotomy, ooops, sorry Mr. Villalobos, a man who just loves pussy - look, I do the jokes round here so stop sniggering! - in particular he loved this one:
In fact, he loved it so much that, in his own words, "he wanted to be one with the tiger" and so, as reported by AP, he jumped into the tiger compound in the Bronx Zoo. Yeeeeeees, quite! Fortunately he was enabled to escape by the prompt action of the keepers and, in the circs, his injuries are fairly light. I wonder if this prat man has ever considered a career in politics? With his survival skills he'd slaughter them in the Senate!
I have tried, really tried, to think of a single reason why Netanyahu will not "Cry 'Havoc' and let slip the dogs of war" in the next two or three weeks. His grand strategic reason is simple - the very existence of his own country and people. The only brake to his action would have been a friendly American ally whose promise that it would stand by Israel at the appropriate time could be relied upon. Unfortunately, Obama, since day one of his presidency, has made it abundantly clear that the existence of Israel is no longer to be considered a prime factor in American policy. In fact, just the opposite because by a slippery use of delay, hesitation and downright slights to Netanyahu, personally as well as politically, he has made it clear that an Iranian bomb and delivery system is not a matter of critical importance to the USA. 'The Kraut' spells it out at The National Review:
There are two positions one can take regarding the Iranian nuclear program: (a) it doesn’t matter, we can deter them, or (b) it does matter, we must stop them.
In my view, the first position — that we can contain Iran as we did the Soviet Union — is totally wrong, a product of wishful thinking and misread history. But at least it’s internally coherent.
What is incoherent is President Obama’s position. He declares the Iranian program intolerable — “I do not have a policy of containment; I have a policy to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon” — yet stands by as Iran rapidly approaches nuclearization.
The Telegraph, reporting on the huge armada gathering at the Straits of Hormuz, confirm the inherent confusion in American policy because at the heart of this allied force are not one but three US carrier groups with a total of more aircraft than the entire Iranian airforce. 'The Kraut' quotes others who can see the idiocy in Obama's confused and confusing policy:
A policy so incoherent, so knowingly and obviously contradictory, is a declaration of weakness and passivity. And this, as Anthony Cordesman, James Phillips, and others have argued, can increase the chance of war. It creates, writes Cordesman, “the same conditions that helped trigger World War II — years of negotiations and threats, where the threats failed to be taken seriously until war became all too real.”
The essence of the matter is the absolute of refusal of Obama and Clinton to draw specific and detailed 'red lines' and issue resolute warnings of the retribution to come if Iran steps over them. 'The Kraut' sums it up, thus:
This is beyond feckless. The Obama policy is a double game: a rhetorical commitment to stopping Iran, yet real-life actions that everyone understands will allow Iran to go nuclear.
Yet at the same time that it does nothing, the administration warns Israel sternly, repeatedly, publicly, even threateningly not to strike the Iranian nuclear program. With zero prospect of his policy’s succeeding, Obama insists on Israeli inaction, even as Iran races to close the window of opportunity for any successful attack.
The cataclysmic shock to the world's economy will be enormous but, my guess, temporary provided that Israel has the where-withal to execute the operation and to lash back successfully against any of its neighbours who might try to fight on Iran's behalf. In fact, if the wilder elements in Palestine and Syria do chance their arm the Israelis might be quite pleased for the opportunity to break it off and beat them over the head with the bloody end!
Just as interesting will be the effect war might have on the American election. I sense a deep strain of war-weariness in the American public and so Obama's 'softly-softly, nicely-nicely' policy towards the Arabs might be applauded and Israel's action deprecated. However, if the Iranians are daft enough to attack US warships, which they have threatened to do, and if they get lucky and take one out in the Straits of Hormuz, then Romney, who I think will win anyway, will then win by a landslide.
I expect the chaps at the FO are doing 24-hour shifts this month (not!) given the potential turbulence building up in foreign affairs. Tomorrow the German Court pronounces on Merkel's efforts at European tap-dancing. One looks to Supreme Courts for clear, straightforward rulings but as the American equivalent showed just recently they can be more slippery than the warranty contract from a second-hand car dealer! Whilst I would stand on the table and sing the German national anthem if they were to stamp their legal jackboots all over the current confection, I am not bothering to learn the words because I expect the usual pile of fudge.
Meanwhile, back East, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and their government are readying themselves for change at the very top. Needless to say, this is all done with absolute secrecy behind closed doors which used to work but, in this day and age of personal and global communications, does not anymore. For example, Xi Jinping, the man slated to be the next Party Secretary, has apparently gone missing, or at least, he has not been seen in public for a week or so and has cancelled various scheduled meetings with foreign visitors, including 'HillBilly'. Needless to say, the Chinese internet has gone viral with unsubstantiated rumours which have now been picked up by the western media.
I was struck by an item in Ferdinand Mount's superb book, Full Circle (of which, more later - you have been warned!), in which he describes the way in which the ancient Greeks and Romans used to call in the populace in their tens of thousands in order discuss and decide on political matters. Today, the internet is the equivalent of those forums and the CCP is floundering in its efforts to control it. Apart from anything else, the CCP have long suffered with a credibility problem given their lack of political 'legitimacy'. Corruption and misrule is rife throughout the regions, as the recent Bo Xilai affair demonstrated. Times are getting hard again in China due to the global economy and the Party is struggling to deal with it. Their banks are broke and several regional governments are getting out of control. There are factions within the CCP who yearn for a return to Mao-ism and they will do their best to whip up nationalism over Chinese claims to various islands in the South China Sea. One piece of information I picked up from those old 'Intel-hands' at 'NightWatch' was the incredible fact that a law was passed in 2005 which would inflict the death penalty on any Chinese leader who allowed any part of Chinese territory to be ceded - and that includes those islands that the Chinese think they own!
"Beware of interesting times" - now who said that? Oh yes, some Chinese chap!
I know, I know, I have cried wolf before but this time I really do believe that Israel is on the brink of an attack on Iran. Those who think this would be a folly and that the Israelis should learn the 'lesson' from the cold war stand-off between the Soviets and the West, that is, that mutually assured destruction works as a deterrent to both sides, should read 'The Kraut' in The WaPo:
There are few foreign-policy positions more silly than the assertion without context that “deterrence works.” It is like saying air power works. Well, it worked for Kosovo; it didn’t work over North Vietnam.
It’s like saying city-bombing works. It worked in Japan 1945 (Tokyo through Nagasaki). It didn’t in the London blitz.
Charles Krauthammer reminds us of the difference between the Soviet communist ethos based on a material 'here and now', and that of the millenarian ravings of religious zealots who believe that there is an infinitely richer existence beyond this squalid life on earth. Also, the clerics are shrewd enough to realise that given the tiny size of Israel and the physical concentration of their population the Israelis are, in effect, a one-bomb target. However, Israel could use all of its arsenal and turn Iran into a wilderness but that would not destroy the vast remaining bulk of Muslims in the Middle-East. It's a win-win situation for Islam. Hence the extreme likelihood of an Israeli pre-emptive strike.
There is no doubt in my mind that there is anything other than an enormous doubt in Israeli minds as to the reliability of President Obama as an ally. Some of his critics accuse him of timidity but that, in my view, is absolutely incorrect. His world-view is steeped in anti-Americanism and that feeling of domestic antogonism reaches out to encompass America's allies, including us, but especially Israel. So Netanyahu has some delicate equations to balance and time is not on his side as the Iranians race towards their nuclear goal. Will Romney, likely to be a more steadfast supporter, win the election? Can Netanyahu squeeze some useful concessions and/or promises from Obama by assuring him that he will not strike before the election?
In another article, 'The Kraut' quotes an American plan of action which, if Romney wins and impliments it, might just save the day. In essence (and it's worth reading the article in full), the progenitor of this plan, Anthony Corseman, a military analyst, suggests a three-part approach. First, make clear to the Iranians that there are only two options left - a deal or a disaster! Second, let the Iranians know that if they choose not to deal then in addition to surgical strikes against nuclear targets there will also be a massive campaign aimed at the total destruction of the entire infrastructure of their country, in other words, they will bomb Iran back to the stone age. Third, if they agree a deal then part of it would be an equivalent of the old Marshall Plan in which huge amounts of aid and trade would flow from the West into Iran guaranteeing them a prosperous future.
Of course, it is not a given that Romney would adopt such a hard-nosed policy because no-one knows anything about his foreign policy views, or, whether he has the cojones for such risk-taking. And needless to say, the Israelis may not wait around to find out!
Looking at this picture, courtesy of The WSJ, I am tempted to ask whether they are kissing or head-butting each other? Or perhaps it is an example of what my Glasgie commenter, Jimmy, would call a 'Glasgie kiss'!
Well, it might have started with kisses and cuddles when the new President of Egypt, Mr. Mursi, met the little glove puppet who thinks he's running Iran at the meeting of the so-called 'non-aligned nations' in Tehran, but it soon turned nasty when two of the principal guests pissed on the Persian carpet, er, metaphorically speaking, of course!
First, President Mursi of Egypt who since his recent election had been making eyes at Iran, suddenly decided to stick up for the Sunnis against the Shiites, thus taking sides in the great religious divide that runs through the MiddleEast. He did so by praising the four Caliphs of Sunni-ism, a deliberate jab at Iran's ruling Shiite theocracy. Then he went even further by berating the Syrian (Shiite and Alawite) regime for its cruelty to its own people in the full and certain knowledge that Iran is supporting them. Some humor was derived from the Iranian simultaneous interpreter who, when required to repeat what amounted in our terms to shouting 'bollocks to the Bishop', gulped and spluttered and finally just sank into silence. The Iranian media either refused to cover Mr. Mursi's speech or simply changed his words!
No sooner was the Persian carpet whisked away for instant cleaning when up stepped Mr. Ban Ki-moon, the head honcho of the United Gangster Federation Nations, no less. He, too, lashed into the Syrian regime who had already walked out on hearing Mr. Mursi's words. Not satisfied with that, he also laid into the Iranians for their murderous threats against Israel. Well, that was like shouting 'Bollocks to the Bishop' in the middle of St. Paul's! Somehow all those Arab outfits and unshaven faces don't quite match what you would expect in a Bateman cartoon but the effect was the same.
By and large, I steer well clear of Middle-East politics because I know even less about it than the other stuff I drone on about. I have no idea which side we should support in the current Syrian imbroglio except that if Iran is for it then we should be against it - whatever 'it' actually is. Above and beyond all other considerations it is is essential to keep the split in the Arab as wide as possible. The more they prey on each other the less time they have to prey on us, so let us ensure that they remain as un-aligned as possible!
They are just so irritating, those Jews, when they don't stick to the script that has been written for them. Thus, when the Jew-hating terrorist leader of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, who has promised 'never to rest until Israel is wiped off the face of the map' asks, surreptitiously, if the Israelis could please give his brother-in-law special heart surgery because it's not available in Gaza, those hard-faced Israelis should have told him and his brother-in-law to go jump in the Dead Sea! Instead, cunning swine that they are, they agreed. Indeed, any Palestinian who requires special medical treatment in Israel can be treated on request. This diabolical act of kindness cunning was obviously undertaken solely for the purposes of embarrassing the Hamas leadership because, guess what, when asked:
No one from Hamas was available for comment on the case.
Apologies for the slight slowdown around here but I am under a certain amount of domestic pressure at the moment, which roughly translates as 'the Memsahib is a bit crock and I'm having to do things I normally take for granted. I have warned her that much more of this and I'm going to trade her in for new model!
Anyway, I have been amused (slightly) by China's efforts to build and operate an aircraft carrier. This has caused the Indians to redouble their efforts to bring their aircraft carrier capacity up to the maximum. It reminds me of all those admirals between the wars who followed Adm. Fisher's pre-WWI policy of building bigger and bigger battleships with bigger and bigger guns. After the First War it was the cheeky young officers who saw that the battleship era was over and that aircraft carriers were the new queen on the naval chessboard. Today, of course, it is missiles, both attack and defence missiles, which are critical and, I guess, a titchy little destroyer now carries ten times more destructive power than Adm. Yamamoto's favourite 18" gun battleship, the Yamato.
But tomorrow, I suspect, it is going to be 'electronics' that will be key to success on the battlefield. Of course, I use the word 'electronics' in the widest sense, not least because I am a man who gives himself a silent cheer everytime I manage to switch my computer on and off! As the bankers have learned - the hard and expensive way - just recently, we are all utterly reliant on 'electronics'. When they go wrong, or just go off, we are well and truly stuffed. It is essential, I believe, that armies and navies need to practice operations without 'electronics' and see how far they get and how well they do. Being essential, my guess is that that they don't bother!
I am provoked to these musings on modern warfare by a small story on the BBC News site introducing us to 'The Worm'! It's a pity this is written and not spoken because it really needs that American guy who does the voice-overs for thrillers to use his deep-pitched, gravelly voice to say omminously, "The Worm is coming!" Here it is:
Doesn't look much, I admit, but the possibilities are manifold. It's the latest robot made for the Pentagon and it imitates not so much "the action of the tiger" but more that of the worm! Made of a flexible mesh 'skin' with wires around it, the operator can send pulses down which makes the 'body' contract and expand and slowly, 0.2" per second, cross ground. So be careful if you are walking along scanning the skies for a drone so small it looks like a bird (that too exists!) because you might tread on a 'worm'.
Right, that's enough meandering for this morning, I will return later.
He's such a tonic! Or perhaps 'antidote' is a better word. For example, I was somewhat disheartened when the Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, came here, opened his mouth and attempted to put both feet in it! Of course, the ratbags of Canary Wharf were on him in seconds and for their usual reason, er, that's circulation in case you don't know it, they blew it up into a far bigger gaffe than it was. Even so, he's a practiced politician and should have known better.
He then went off to Poland and Israel and, according to the American MSM, he went on hurling gaffes around like Obama hurls drones! The MSM 'over there' are, for the most part, the communications wing of the Democrat machine and so they even managed to outdo the Canary Wharf rats in their hyping of Romney's bloopers. I didn't follow the details of exactly what he was supposed to have said which is why I tell you that you really should have a 'Kraut' to turn to in need. I mean, of course, Charles Krauthammer, who, in The National Review, turned his steely gaze at this minor hoo-ha-ha and injected some realism into it. First of all, he castigated Romney for his British blooper:
In answer to a question about the Olympics, he expressed skepticism about London’s preparations. The response confounded and agitated Romney supporters because it was such an unforced error. The question invited a simple paean to Olympic spirit and British grit, not the critical analysis of a former Olympic organizer.
So much for that but then, turning to the Polish trip, it transpires that Romney did not say anything untoward, in fact, just the opposite:
The Warsaw leg was a triumph. Romney’s speech warmly embraced Poland’s post-Communist experiment as a stirring example of a nation committed to limited government at home and a close alliance with America abroad, even unto such godforsaken war zones as Afghanistan and Iraq, at great cost to itself and with little thanks.
Especially little from the Obama administration, which unilaterally canceled a Bush(43)-era missile-defense agreement with Poland to appease Russia. Without any overt criticism of the current president, Romney set out a foreign policy of radically greater appreciation of and fidelity to American allies.
The only unfortunate language was used by an understandably irritated staffer who snapped at members of the (Democrat) press corps for shouting out stupid questions. But by now the (Democrat) MSM were in full cry and when Romney, during his trip to Israel, told the absolute truth concerning the differences between Arab and Israeli societies and how, in effect, the former could not run the proverbial whelk stall whilst the latter would have a chain of discount whelk stalls up and running in weeks, they tore into him. 'The Kraut' Korrekted, ooops, sorry, must stop with the aliteration jokes, put the non-story into context:
What about the alleged gaffe that dominated reporting from Israel? Romney averred that Israeli and Palestinian economic development might be related to culture. A Palestinian Authority spokesman obligingly jumped forth to accuse Romney of racism, among other thought crimes.
The American media bought it whole, despite the fact that Romney’s assertion was a direct echo of the U.N. Arab Human Development Report, written by Arab intellectuals and commissioned by the U.N. It unambiguously asserted that “culture and values are the soul of development.” And went on to report how existing cultural norms — “including traditional Arab culture and values” — are among the major impediments to Arab economic progress. (My emphasis)
The report deplores the rampant corruption, repressive governance, and lack of women’s (and human) rights as major contributors to backwardness in the Arab world. (In the Palestinian case, it faults Israeli “occupation,” but a U.N. document that doesn’t blame Israel for every Palestinian sorrow, if not the world’s, has yet to be written. Moreover, that excuse doesn’t work for today’s occupation-free, Palestinian-run Gaza.) Is there any question about Romney’s assertion? PLO/PA corruption is a legend. Palestinians are repelled by it. Why do you think the PA lost the 2006 (and last) free election?
Romney’s point about “culture” was to highlight the improbable emergence of Israel from resourceless semi-desert to First World “startup nation,” a tribute to its freedom and openness.
In addition, Romney made clear that Jerusalem was the capital of Israel, no ifs or buts. Also, he made clear to the Israeli government that if he is president and they feel the need to defend the existence of their country he will not stand in their way.
So, courtesy of 'The Kraut' we now know that apart from treading on 'Dim Dave's' shiny shoes, and who really cares about that, his trip was a great success, that is, the exact opposite of what was reported.
There was an interesting conversation over at waka waka waka, the site of my old e-pal, Malcolm Pollack, which began on the subject of Danny Boyle's production which opened the Olympic games but moved on rapidly to the subject of immigration and whether it is 'A Good Thing' or 'A Bad Thing'. Now I cannot get the damned subject out of my mind - not that I have managed to come to any definitive conclusion, mind you!
To start with, I'm not at all sure how, and with what, you measure the cost/benefits. There are obvious costs in schooling, in welfare benefits and in medical services for this fairly hefty influx of people. On the other hand, most of them work (in direct contrast to our own home-grown under-class), start businesses, pay taxes, raise families which, again in contrast to much of English society, are imbued with a strong family ethic. Looking back, I suppose the first modern influx were the Jews fleeing this or that European maniac. I don't think anyone could say that was anything other than a superb gift to this country. The contribution of the Jews to the scientific and artistic and indeed just about every aspect of our society has been tremendous.
After them came the Caribbean blacks in the '50s and '60s. They may not have contributed so much to the intellectual life of Britain but they have certainly raised the standards of sporting achievements. And again, most of them worked hard and contributed to society. It is perhaps an ironic commentary upon the success with which they have melded into the home-grown population that last year's riots were very definitely an 'equal opportunities' exercise with black and white 'youfs' and 'youfettes' working well together! That their young people have proved such a disappointment to their hard-working immigrant parents is, of course, entirely the fault of the white, well-meaning, infantile and utterly malignant influence of what I call the 'Polly Toynbee Tendency'! The fact that more and more Caribbean parents are sending their children to school back in their old Islands says it all.
Next along was the Asian invasion. This, I think, needs to be divided between the Hindus and the Muslims. The Hindus flocked in first when many of them were expelled from Uganda. Again, somewhat like the Jews, they have definitely been a major contributor to British life particularly in the world of business. By and large they keep themselves and their communities to themselves and I suspect, but cannot prove, that many (most?), whilst all too well aware of the bad things in British society, are simply grateful to be living in a sytem which is fairly stable, prosperous and with a rule of law.
Finally, we have the mass Muslim invasion. This has proved more difficult, not so much, I think, because of the immigrants themselves but because they 'represent', so to speak, troublesome, difficult countries which are very different from the UK. On top of that, they are imbued with a fairly militant religion which senses that it is under threat (which it is, in the long run) and is therefore all the more fierce. This has co-incided with international tensions between, using the shorthand, 'the west' and 'the Muslim east'. However, once again, it is a truly remarkable, one might say 'miraculous', fact that this influx has passed off so well. Of course, there are troubles and tensions and fights and occasional hard violence, but given the scale of the numbers involved it is quite extraordinary that it has been so peaceful! Even the terrorist influence has been minimal with just a few young men doing what all young men dream of doing, fighting for this or that cause.
What is often over-looked is the effect we are having on them! There is a case currently active in the courts in which a Muslim father and his wife are facing charges over the alleged murder of one of his daughters who failed to abide by paternal, male discipline. I have no idea if the man is guilty or not but his predicament moves me to pity. I really do not wish to use the old cliche that it resembles 'a Shakespearean tragedy' - except that it does! Here is an obviously proud, fierce man imbued with the traditions of his ethnicity and religion brought to a blazing rage by a daughter subverted (in his eyes) by western notions of individual liberty, a concept utterly foreign and repugnant to him. I repeat, I do not know whether he went as far as murder, but the end result is the same, his family and his life have been destroyed. He must wonder if he might not have been better off remaining in Pakistan!
All these musings, of course, like everything else on this blog, take us nowhere definite. Mass global shifts in populations will continue for exactly the same reason that dogs lick their bollocks, because they can! How they turn out in this or that particular country depends entirely on the nature of the host country concerned. For Britain, I suppose all that one can say, very tentatively, is so far so good!
According to Ambrose E-P in The Telegraph, on Thursday the band will stop playing and the European leaders will be forced to quit dancing around and around and instead sit down and take a final decision for good or ill. The markets have had enough shilly-shallying and the experts are now convinced that both Spain and Italy will require emergency rescues either in weeks or certainly by the end of the year. Their minimum requirements will amount to at least e1.2 trillion over three years and if they try to raise that sort of dosh in the markets they will be laughed out of town.
There was, there is and there will forever be, only two possible solutions to the problem. Either the euro zone breaks up into Northern and Southern groupings (using those terms elastically), or, the Germans agree to allow the European Central Bank (ECB) to stand full square behind the national debts of the member countries - but with Germany, in turn, agreeing to stand full square behind it! One senses that the markets have reached what is known colloquially as their 'fuck 'em threshold'. Any more attempts by European leaders to pile words on the table instead of German financial pledges will simply bring on the deluge.
Mind you, there is a political price to pay whatever they do. According to Ambrose E-P, there is already a fierce, not to say threatening, dispute between Catalonia and Madrid arising from the peculiarities of the internal arrangements within Spain. He refers, in a particularly apt phrase to "political revulsion", and that is likely to rear its ugly head all over Europe if this imbroglio continues.
Thus spake, or rather, wrote, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in The Daily Telegraph. His article reminds us that there is no hiding place in this new, 21st century, global economy. The old British saying that if America sneezed we caught a cold is completely out of date. Today, economic disasters in one area spread round the world with the speed of the 1918 influenza epidemic. I have mentioned before my doubts concerning the Chinese economy when I provided reports on all those brand, new cities which had been built on borrowed money and which were deserted. It reminded me of southern Spain in the late '90s when all you could see for miles and miles along the coast line were hundreds of cranes and block after block of empty flats and villas. A E-P quotes a Chinese economist:
"While an economy-wide generalized deflation is yet to be seen, the deflationary spiral looks to have started in some industrial sectors, attesting to considerable stress with the economy. Persistent deflation can be poisonous," said Xianfang Ren from IHS Global Insight in Beijing.
A good indicator of the financial sense of well-being amongst affluent, middle-class Chinese is the casino revenues in Macau. The Chinese have gambling fever the way we have 'footie' fever. A E-P reports that the revenues have dropped 11% in June. He points us to the very informative Also Sprach Analyst site which provides 10 big indicators that all is far from well 'out there':
1: Heavy equipment makers who provide financial deals for their customers to purchase are finding it increasingly difficult to collect their dues.
2: Steelmakers' profits have collapsed for lack of demand.
3: Some steelmakers are producing but many steel traders further down the line are going out of business.
4: Through lack of demand from heavy industry coal stocks are enormous and some warehouses are almost full.
5: Both coal miners and steelmakers are diversifying into new businesses - including selling pigs!
6: The cotton inventory at the ports is huge partly due to speculators coming unstuck as the price of cotton fell.
7: As mentioned before, the Macau casino revenues have dropped.
8: When the Chinese government tightened policy last year bank loans were hard to get so a new and shadowy system of 'Trusts' grew up but now the companies who used these devices are finding it increasingly difficult to repay. Many of them are real estate developers.
9: Yet another dodgy banking practice has come to light inone province when a fair-sized company went broke. Unfortunately, many smaller companies were accessing bank loans on the basis of another company guaranteeing their borrowing. It turns out, (natch!) that all the companies in this particular area were all guaranteeing each other's loans. Cue falling dominoes!
10: The Chinese yuan/renmimbi is falling. The government is happy for that but it still indicates problems.
A E-P sums it up thus:
But at the end of the day, the country is bursting with industrial over-capacity. As Caixin reported recently, eight of the ten largest shipyards did not receive any new orders in the first five months of the year.
Albert Edwards from Societe Generale said the danger now is that China suddenly lurches into a deeper downturn, unleashing a flood of excess goods onto global markets and sending a powerful deflationary impulse across the world.
Well, if they do release a flood of cheap goods at least my tailor, 'M. A. Talan', will be able to keep me in the style to which I have grown accustomed with chinos for £14 or less, perhaps!
An interesting article by Robert Kaplan on the Stratfor site in which he lays bare the inadequacies of NATO and, in essence, poses the question: what is NATO for? Quite correctly he reminds us that even from its inception NATO was utterly dependent on American military might. The fairly hefty armed forces of Britain and France which they possessed at the end of WWII soon withered on the vine of a domestic public opinion tired of war and demanding welfare state benefits and the shrinkage has continued unabated. Now, as American grand strategy turns to face China rather than Russia, even the American contingent is disappearing as two of the four American combat brigades in Europe are withdrawn. 'Dave' and the 'Dwarf' might have puffed their chests out after their Libyan adventure but as Kaplan cruelly reminds them - and us:
Whatever one thought of the Libya intervention, the details make for a bad advertisement about NATO. As one U.S. Air Force planner told me, "It was like Snow White and the 27 dwarfs, all standing up to her knees" -- the United States being Snow White and the other NATO member states being the dwarfs. The statistics regarding just how much the United States had to go it alone in Libya -- pushed by the British and French -- despite the diplomatic fig leaf of "leading from behind," are devastating for the alliance.
More than 80 percent of the gasoline used in the intervention came from the U.S. military. Almost all the individual operation orders had an American address. Of dozens of countries taking part, only eight air forces were allowed by their defense ministries to drop any bombs. Many flew sorties apparently only for the symbolism of it. While most airstrikes were carried out by non-U.S. aircraft, the United States ran the logistical end of the war.
NATO has become like that other great tottering mirage, the so-called European Union, a figment in the imaginations of the politicians who refuse to see the pikestaff that is plainly before their noses. At least in the area of international finance the markets are forcing the euro-zone politicians to face the realities of life but, alas, the great blundering NATO machine stumbles on - but only for as long as the USA fills the tank. In my view, the quicker America pulls out the better because there is every chance with this bloated military monstrosity, which fights wars as far away as Afghanistan, of getting us into something we have no business or interest in. The recent 'handbags-at-dawn' incident between NATO member Turkey and its neighbour Syria is a case in point. Do we really want to fight for the Turks? Whilst NATO exists the politicians will continue to use it as a plaything. So, please Uncle Sam, thank you for sticking around when Uncle Joe was pissed on vodka and being a thoroughly bad neighbour but now it's time to force us Euro-weenies to grow up and fight our own battles.
Of course, he added hurriedly, that doesn't include us, your cousins nephews! No, no, you can keep your airbases and rocket sites on our strategically placed off-shore island and your CIA is more than welcome to stay. After all, whilst at the moment you are more concerned about the South China Sea you would not wish to give up your influence and your bases, free of Franco-German influence, on the other side of the Atlantic, would you? No, of course not!
But being serious for a moment, the demise of NATO would require Britain to rethink with great clarity what arrangements, if any, it should make in the field of defence. I might waffle around that subject tomorrow.
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