The New American Cold War

Have been rather busy for the last couple of months. But thanks for keeping this place running:) I was thinking of trying to specialise this blog a bit. The idea being that I try to find articles about Russia. Anyway, here is the first one. I only managed to get about three quarters of the way through it - have to go, I am already late. But it's a good one.

Here is a nice quote from the first page

[The Nation: June 21, 2006 ]

More fundamental realities indicate that Russia remains in an unprecedented state of peacetime demodernization and depopulation. Investment in the economy and other basic infrastructures remains barely a third of the 1990 level. Some two-thirds of Russians still live below or very near the poverty line, including 80 percent of families with two or more children, 60 percent of rural citizens and large segments of the educated and professional classes, among them teachers, doctors and military officers.

The important bit here for me is not about the poverty line or that Russian intellectuals live in such sorry conditions (as opposed to their compatriots who moved to Germany, Israel and US a decade ago and have now managed to make a good life for themselves.) The most damning sentence here is the one about the investment in intrastructure - a third of the 1990 level!!

If that's true, then it's even worse than I suspected. Without proper modern infrastructure you can't really function in the global economy. Things are dragging along now because of massive fossil fuel exports, but even here there is very little investment into exploration of new fields etc. (Can't remember where I read that one)

this week in london

This week London's Metropolitan Police force decided to shoot more innocent people.

Just in case last year's execution of Jean Charles De Menezes wasn't proof enough that the Met's chiefs are incompetent, their policy of 'shoot-first, think-later' seems to have found them wanting again.

Also, why is their PR soooo bad... you'd think as a police force for one of the biggest cities in the world they'd have loads of good excuses prepared for such scenarios, but all they can come up with is stuff like: 'we had no choice' or '[the officer] did not deliberately fire the shot'.

Jacob Weisberg smells gas

Here is a very clear article in Slate about economics and common sense when it comes to gas prices. Here are some quotes:

[Slate: April 26th, 2006]

With gasoline prices now spiking around $3 a gallon—near their inflation-adjusted 1981 peak—we are witnessing stupidity on wheels. Republicans, who as incumbents fear that they will be blamed, are in a kind of frenzy to abandon free-market principles, basic economic reasoning, and increasingly, reason itself.
[...]
If you don't have some sort of monopoly power, gouging is another word for charging the highest price the market will bear, also known as capitalism. This is why the FTC investigation has turned up nothing. What constrains filling stations from marking up gas excessively is not the fear of prosecution but competition from other filling stations.
[...]
Of course, there is outrageous anti-competitive conduct in the petroleum industry—it's called OPEC.
[...]
[Democrats] also have their own distinctive form of gas-price stupidity, which is to ignore the conflict between the environmentalism they espouse and the cheap fuel they demand. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi even moaned about high gas prices in her Earth Day statement last week.
[...]
What none can acknowledge is that higher gas prices in the United States are a good thing. To be sure, oil at $70 a barrel causes hardships for working people and delights some of the world's worst dictators. But cheap gasoline imposes its own costs on society: greenhouse gas emissions, air pollution and its attendant health risks, traffic congestion, and accidents.

It is rather strange that a society committed to free market solutions, whenever possible, is willing to drop these principles so quickly when "the going gets tough". This increase in price of oil is actually a very generous subsidy for the development of more environmentally friendly sources of energy. As the author points out, those who support cleaner environment should actually welcome this increase in price.

The question is not whether one day we will run out of oil, or that we will find other sources of energy to replace it. The answer is a definite yes on both counts. The question should be whether we will irreversibly trash our planet in the process.

This hike in oil price may be the last chance for us to get our act together.

Can't touch this..

This is so awesome, apparently MC Hammer has a blog as well on Blogger. Check it out: Look Look Look

Lordi@Eurovision Song Contest

Eurovision is one of those things we make fun of, but can't quite manage to escape. Inevitably year after year, Finland ends up somewhere at the bottom of the list of European countries. With nothing to lose, this year they are sending Lordi.

[http://www.antenna.nu/lordi/interview1.php]

[Guardian: April 25th, 2006]

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the choice of Lordi has been greeted with dismay by religious groups both in Finland and abroad. A group of Greek protesters known as the Hellenes have called on the Finnish government to intervene: "We ask the Finnish Commission of the Eurovision Song Contest to cancel the procedure and choose another song. This evil and satanic Finnish band is not welcome in Greece." (This year's contest will take place on May 20 in Athens).

I think I am going to watch Eurovision this year. Maybe that's why they are sending Lordi.

Sometimes a murder is just a murder

I came across this headline from Foxnews: Ethnic Gang Murder.

[Foxnews: 24th April, 2006]

Nearly 80,000 demonstrators flooded the streets in Belgium on Sunday in a silent march to commemorate a murdered teenager who was killed for refusing to give up his digital music player to two North African gang members.

The march was called by a Moroccan-born parliament member, who said the murder "stinks of racism" by increasingly violent North African street gangs — which he said, "go after victims who look like infidels."

But you wouldn't know the killing had any racial overtones from reading the AP's report on the march, which never once mentions the ethnicity of the killers. The BBC also left that detail out of its television report.

It did take me a while to dig up this story, it got buried in the news stories of bombings in Israel and Egypt.

But finally I came up with this:

[Flandersnews.be : 25th April, 2006]

The teenager in question is not the actual murderer but his accomplice; identified as the young man in the Nike top, seen on the CCTV footage.

Witnesses had described both offenders as being of North African origin. It now seems that Joe Van Holsbeeck's murderers are Polish.
[...]
The second suspect, the murder [sic] himself, has been identified but is currently in hiding. It is now suspected that he has fled to Poland. Detectives have come to this conclusion after analyzing signals from his mobile phone.

I guess BBC and AP had a point when they left out the ethnicity of the killers, the last thing anyone needs now is a war between these two EU members.

None of this should really be surprising, Fox News has a bit of a reputation when it comes to jumping to conclusions.

Malaya as a model for Iraq

[The New Republic: April 19th, 2006]

Today, as the Bush administration searches for a counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq, several military thinkers are pointing to the British operations in Malaya as a model. Episodes like the Batang Kali massacre seem to have been forgotten. Instead, contemporary analysts argue that Great Britain effectively suppressed communist insurgents and won civilian support through a large-scale, "hearts-and-minds campaign."
[...]
To seize civilian control, the British created a police state and invoked draconian powers ranging from movement-restriction and collective punishments to detention without trial.
[...]
Nearly the entire Chinese population of 400,000 to 500,000 were forced from their homes and were resettled into some 400 heavily guarded barbed-wire villages. They were deprived of all civil rights, and they endured great physical and emotional abuse.
[...]
In some ways, the U.S. military in Iraq is already following the British counterinsurgency model in Malaya. Although stateside leaders and strategists continue to pay lip service to the hearts-and-minds approach, the reality is that commanders on the ground, much like their counterparts in the former British empire, are skeptical. As Iraq ground commander General Thomas Metz stated bluntly, "[I] don't think we will put much energy into trying the old saying, 'Win the hearts and minds.' I don't look at it as one of the metrics of success."

This brings to mind the American "pacification" of Philippines and the British concentration camps in the Boer war at the beginning of the 20th century.

These three cases demonstrate that it is possible for armed forces to eliminate an insurgency. They also show that the occupying force has to resort to methods as savage as that of the insurgents. Although it's possible to do this in Iraq, it's very improbable that the current occupying powers have the political will to go through with this. With journalists and soldiers reporting on the situation in the country, the occupation is becoming more unpopular back home in US.

The only successful example of hearts and minds approach that I can think of, is the Marshall plan after the Second World War. Of course there was another reason for this approach then, USA did not want western Europe to fall to Soviet Union. US needed strong allies and took measures to create them.

It seems strange that US would not pursue a similar approach in Iraq, instead of investing money on expensive military gadgets, and writing blank checks to dodgy contractors. It seems that the current US administration is still confused in it's relationship with Iraq. Perhaps if US were to invest in Iraq, the way it invested in Western Germany after 1945, it would find itself with a powerful secular ally. However, all this talk of gradual troops withdrawal, is a further indicator that it's not interested in being an important player in the local politics.

I suppose things were much more simple in Malaya and Philippines.

that bloody woman

i just thought i'd inform you all that today i will be attempting to avoid watching any news at all.

This is due to the fact that it is the Queen's 80 Birthday and on this day England (and Australia too i'd guess) goes completely crazy, gushes with praise and celebrates the fact that background means everything. We (especially if we are the BBC) heap praise on some obscure white aristocratic family and cherish the days when Britain really was 'Great'...

Even news sources i usually respect tend to be complementary to that ruddy Windsor chick on days like these... and it makes me sick.

--- end of rant ---

Russian Media

Once every couple of months I try to find some sensible Russian newspapers on the web. I am sure they do exist, but after couple of hours I usually give up - too much nationalism and too little self-criticism tends to have that effect on me. Anyway, this is a list of newspapers I have come up with by checking what BBC monitors over there.

Gazeta
Nezavisimaya Gazeta
Novaya Gazeta
Moskovskaya Pravda
Moskovskiy Komsomolets
The Moscow Times
The Moscow News
Sovetskaya Rossiya
Kommersant
Vedomosti
Izvestia
Argumentiy i Faktiy

Will go through them in the next couple of days and try to find something sensible (i.e. having a liberal and democratic outlook - and I don't mean the ideas of the party run by Mr Zhirinovsky)

Meanwhile I will add Pravda (English version) to the news links, I was going to add it to the "right" section, but it is too messed up for that, although it does somewhat remind me of the Fox News. It's great entertainment of the fictional variety.

Political ads don't work

There is something very wrong with this article about political advertising.

[Guardian: 19th April, 2006]

"There is a myth about political advertising," warned Philip Gould, New Labour's polling and marketing guru, in his book The Unfinished Revolution. "Advertising has an effect but it is small and rarely decisive. It is certain that in four of the last five elections, advertising did not materially influence the result.

"The one possible exception is the 1992 election, where it can be argued that [Labour's] Tax Bombshell had some effect on the electorate. But even that is highly debatable. Labour lost that election because it was not yet electable."

That scepticism is echoed in the only recent study of political advertising in Britain, by David Sanders and Pippa Norris, which examined the effects of ads in the 2001 election. They found that the overall impact was small, that attack advertising was counter-productive and that ads were disproportionately effective for smaller parties who otherwise struggled for coverage.

I think there have been cases where political advertising worked. Otherwise, why are people convinced that Al Gore said that he "invented the internet", or that Kerry is a flip flopper whose record in Vietnam is worse than that of that "no-show" George AWOL Bush. Perhaps things in Britain are different, but character assassination, if done well, does bring about the desired results.

I also can't help wondering how they went about measuring the effectiveness of these adverts. Did they just go to people and ask them, "Do you feel that this advertisement made you like Tony more or less?". The point is that these adverts should work on subconscious as well as on a conscious level. But I am speculating here, since there is no account of their methodology at all.