“Let us say, hypothetically, that American forces kill or capture Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar, enabling President Obama to declare victory and bring our troops home. Would he? Not according to the Pentagon’s plan for a fifty-year “Long War” of counterinsurgency spanning Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Horn of Africa, the Philippines and beyond.
Military intellectuals envision a prolonged cold war against Al Qaeda, with hot wars along the way. It happens that the Long War is over Muslim lands rich with oil, natural gas and planned pipelines. The Pentagon identifies them as hostile terrain where Al Qaeda and its affiliates are hidden.
Among the top experts responsible for this fifty-year war plan, concocted in 2005 in windowless offices in the Pentagon, is Dr. David Kilcullen, a former Australian soldier, an anthropologist, former top adviser to Gen. David Petraeus and current aide to Gen. Stanley McChrystal. Kilcullen is a media favorite, the subject of a long New Yorker profile by George Packer, glowing columns by David Ignatius in the Washington Post and weighty late-night conversations with Charlie Rose.”
Kilcullen’s recent book, The Accidental Guerrilla, presents the case for a Long War of fifty or even 100 years’ duration, with chapters on Iraq (a mistake he believes was salvaged by the military surge he promoted in 2007-08), Afghanistan (where he recommends at least a five-to-ten-year campaign), Pakistan (whose tribal areas he sees as the center of the terrorist threat) and even Europe (where, he says, human rights laws create legislative “safe havens” for urban Muslim undergrounds). More
“Mr Wilshire, the MP for Spelthorne in Surrey, made the announcement after spending hours attempting to defend his allowance claims to the Tory leadership.
He said that the investigation into his controversial arrangements would cause “great distress” to his family and friends.
“These allegations also run the risk of harming my local party and our national party’s chances of winning at the next general election,” he said.
The Daily Telegraph disclosed Mr Wilshire had paid £105,500 from his office and staffing allowances to Moorlands Research Services, a company owned by him and his girlfriend.
Parliamentary rules dictate that MPs must not enter financial arrangements that “may give rise to an accusation” that they or someone close to them profited from public funds. More
thepoliteer says: You do wonder if they will ever join the rest of us in the real world… Oh yes, great timing time as well, just as they are wiping the parliamentary gravy off their chins…
“MPs are campaigning to reverse the decision to halve the number of seats reserved exclusively for them and their guests in the Commons’ Strangers Cafe.
Fifteen have backed a motion opposing the decision to expand the area staff and visitors can use.
They want the authorities to reverse the change “immediately”.
The change was made because staff and visitors often have to wait for a seat even if the less-used cordoned off MPs’ section has spaces.” More
Carolyn Gold Heilbrun (January 13, 1926 in East Orange, New Jersey – October 9, 2003) was an American academic and prolific feminist. Heilbrun attended graduate school in English literature at Columbia University, receiving her M.A. in 1951 and Ph.D in 1959. Among her most important mentors were Columbia professors Jacques Barzun and Lionel Trilling, while Clifton Fadiman was an important inspiration.
Heilbrun taught English at Columbia for more than three decades (1960-1993). She was the first woman to receive tenure in Columbia’s English department (not unlike Trilling, who became first tenured Jew in that department less than two decades earlier). Her academic specialty was British modern literature, with a particular interest in the Bloomsbury group. Her academic books include the feminist study Writing a Woman’s Life (1988) — see non-fiction bibliography, below. Upon her retirement in 1997, she was Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities Emerita at Columbia.
Thinking about profound social change, conservatives always expect disaster, while revolutionaries confidentially expect utopia. Both are wrong.
“Our growing demand for cheap feed to produce cheap meat is exacting a terrible human and environmental price. But the solutions are clear, and are within our reach.
Many people are surprised to find out that the meat and dairy industry produces more climate-changing emissions than all the planes, cars and lorries on the planet – and that a hidden chain of destruction links animals in British factory farms to rainforest destruction in South America.
Animals in British and European factory farms are pumped full of high-protein feed to grow quickly and produce high yields. The protein in animal feed is provided by soy, most of which is shipped in from industrial GM plantations created by cutting 
down rainforest in South America. This releases vast quantities of climate-changing gases, destroys trees, plants and animals and drives out communities that have lived on the land for centuries.
The huge soy plantations needed just to feed factory farms in Europe every year cover almost 10 million hectares in South America – and demand is growing fast. In the UK, factory farming is almost wholly dependent on the availability of this cheap soy feed – but at the expense of UK citizens and farmers.” More
“Labour have received the largest boost from the conference season according to a new poll which shows the party narrowing the gap on the Conservatives.
The Times/Populus poll put the Conservatives down one point to 40 per cent, with Labour up three points to 30 per cent and the Liberal Democrats unchanged on 18 per cent. Other parties are down two points to 12 per cent. If repeated at a general election, the figures would give David Cameron a Commons majority of just eight.
The results stand in sharp contrast to a recent ICM poll which showed the Conservative lead rising to 19 points in the wake of Cameron’s conference speech.
Cameron continues to enjoy a commanding lead over Brown as the best person to lead the country after the election, backed by 48 per cent of voters against 28 per cent for the prime minister. He also leads Brown as the person best equipped to deal with the recession by 45 to 30 per cent. At the height of the financial crisis, Brown led Cameron by 52 to 32 per cent on dealing with the recession.” (Source)
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (German pronunciation: [ˈɡeɔʁk ˈvɪlhɛlm ˈfʁiːdʁɪç ˈheːɡəl]) (August 27, 1770 – November 14, 1831) was a German philosopher, one of the creators of German Idealism, and along with Immanuel Kant, one of the most influential philosophers of the Age of Enlightenment.
Hegel developed a comprehensive philosophical framework, or “system”, to account in an integrated and developmental way for the relation of mind and nature, the subject and object of knowledge, and psychology, the state, history, art, religion and philosophy. In particular, he developed a concept of mind or spirit that manifested itself in a set of contradictions and oppositions that it ultimately integrated and united, without eliminating either pole or reducing one to the other. Examples of such contradictions include those between nature and freedom, and between immanence and transcendence.
Hegel influenced writers of widely varying positions, including both his admirers (Bauer, Feuerbach, Marx, Bradley, Dewey, Sartre, Küng, Kojève, Žižek) and his detractors (Schelling, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Peirce, Russell).[1] His influential conceptions are of speculative logic or “dialectic”, “absolute idealism”, “Spirit”, negativity, sublation (Aufhebung in German), the “Master/Slave” dialectic, “ethical life” and the importance of history.
What experience and history teach is this — that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles.
thepoliteer says: It looks like our politicians are not the only ones fiddling their expenses. The excellent science blog ‘Watts Up With That‘ reports that Denmark’s chief climate negotiator Thomas Becker has resigned from his position as deputy permanent secretary in the Ministry for Climate and Energy. Apparently…
Becker has left office with immediate effect after not presenting sufficient documentation for expensive restaurant bills, according to reports in the Danish media. One bill for 39 people allegedly included 37 bottles of red wine, and Becker was given a formal warning in March over travel expenses.
I suppose it’s reassuring that it’s not just us…
thepoliteer says: I’m not sure what I think about the concept of TV debates – though I lean towards a negative view. The experience in the USA is not good.
On the minus side, they are poor vehicles for serious policy debate, and pander to the growing development of ‘personality’ politics. Do we not get enough of this at the ridiculous Prime Ministers Questions? Further, let’s face it, most voters will not watch the debates in the first place. Many others will turn off their TV’s following the debate having either confirmed old prejudices, or, having decided their future vote on who scrub’s up best on the night.
On the plus side, anything that promotes some kind of engagement in the political process is good – though I would question how real this engagement is.
The BBC covers the current discussion here
George Burns (January 20, 1896 – March 9, 1996), born Nathan Birnbaum, was an American comedian, actor, and writer.
His career spanned vaudeville, film, radio, and television, with and without his wife, Gracie Allen. His arched eyebrow and cigar smoke punctuation became familiar trademarks for over three quarters of a century. He enjoyed a career resurrection that began at age 79 and ended shortly before his death at age 100.
Too bad that all the people who really know how to run the country are busy driving taxi cabs and cutting hair.
See previous posts for Pt’s 1 & 2.
thepoliteer says: The good people at ‘Democratic Audit’ have taken a moment to put together a version of the UK’s first written constitution. The executive summary is shown below:
WE, THE ELITE, do not believe in the kind of constitution most other advanced nations have – those that boast a belief in popular sovereignty; with resounding declarations such as ‘we, the people’, and that tend to contain rules about how governments should act.
We describe ours as the ‘unwritten constitution’. It is a collection of laws, fictions, powers left over from the old monarchy and powers that we make up as we go along. We disguise the fact that it is neither popular, representative nor accountable through a set of myths about the ‘Mother of Parliaments’, Magna Carta and the rule of law.
We hide our power behind a grand title, the Sovereignty of Parliament. It has a democratic ring to it, but legally this sovereignty is vested in the Crown in Parliament, or in plainer language, in the hands of the Prime Minister and government within Parliament. This enables us to combine executive and legislative power. Parliament by and large passes all the laws that we tell it to, or better still, we can employ devices, known as statutory instruments, to make the law so that we do not have to bother with Parliament that much.
Parliament, far from being representative of the people, is actually our bulwark against the people. We are also able to treat the people not as citizens but as subjects. We encourage people to believe that they are free, though actually they are in chains, unfelt but real nevertheless,
One most helpful myth is widely believed – that the great virtue of the obsolete electoral system that we use for elections to Parliament is that it enables the people to ‘chuck the rascals out.’ Actually it is the secret of our grasp on power. Elections are unavoidable, but we can reduce their unpredictability in a variety of ways. First-past-the-post elections limit the number of parties that have a chance of winning power, and most MPs – four out of every five – can count on being returned at a general election (if not after an expenses scandal). Moreover, once in power governments can usually expect to be returned over a series of elections. The electoral system for the House of Lords is even more efficient – we do not have one. We are quietly perfecting the principle of non-election by creating bodies known as quangos at all levels of government, national, regional and local, and run by people whom we appoint and trust. A great number have usurped the roles of elected local councils allowing us to subdue local councils and more or less abolish local democracy.
We justify our ability to create new powers and ways of governing, or to change how we run the country to suit the Prime Minister or his or her cabinet, by extolling the flexible nature of the unwritten constitution. The great advantage of this flexibility is that once we have hit on a new way of behaving, it becomes part of the constitution. And we can modernise easily. So we have moved on from old-fashioned cabinet government to sofa government by the prime minister with trusted allies and special advisers. Presidential, yes, but faster and more efficient.
This excellent state of affairs allows us to exercise executive power more or less as we please while the whole world admires us as a democracy. In fact, our unwritten constitution is what governments do – as opposed to all those foreign constitutions that tell governments what to do.
These are the Unspoken Articles of what the Minister of Justice calls our executive democracy.
