Royal Bank of Scotland - GIVE US OUR MONEY BACK!

Workfare has arrived in Britain, smuggled in with slippery rhetoric

The intriguing thing is whether the recession could lead to a sea change in attitudes to poverty. As a million people lose their jobs through no fault of their own, will we learn again to value the concept of social security? Might people begin to see that beyond the tabloid panics about benefit scroungers, there are plenty of people tangled up in the benefits system who hit hard times through illness, disability or redundancy? With the recession, a whole new section of society will discover the bewildering, petty world of welfare, where benefit levels are set at punitively low levels, well below the government's absolute poverty measure. You can't manage on benefit levels - you are not supposed to; they are designed to force people back into work. But the big question is what happens when there isn't the work? How do you justify that kind of poverty?

from the guardian

Israeli Election - We all lost

Shareholders are called to assemblies to elect a new CEO. The shareholders of Israel settled for choosing the directors, who agree on nothing, let alone on a CEO. A business without a CEO won't get far, let alone a complex business like the State of Israel.
Any structure other than a unity government will require six different parties, each one capable of bringing that government down. Therefore, each will be infinitely able to extort money for its own causes. The government will be unstable, spendthrift and irresolute.

from Haaretz.com

Israeli Big Brother

"I'd be talking to people like you only if I'm armed with a baton."

from Haaretz.com

Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity

It takes an extraordinarily heartless conman to swindle a survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald and Nobel Peace Prize winner out of all his charitable funds.

from timesonline

In times of crisis, never forget the value of gold

People buy gold when they are nervous about the economy, and they are right to do so because gold is a unique commodity. It has to a high degree two qualities that are seldom found together: liquidity and reality. It has strong liquidity; it can almost always be bought, sold or exchanged. There are other liquid assets, of which the US dollar is probably supreme, but they lack gold's quality of real value.

Dollars do not constitute a real asset, such as property or “real estate”. The dollar is simply a piece of paper. Gold has been a much better store of value than the dollar.

from TimesOnline

Organic Conservatism, Administrative Realism, and the Imperialist Ethos in the 'Indian Career' of John Stuart Mill

It is not only Mill but his biographers, and many scholars as well, who have been loathe to recognize that Mill's 35-year tenure at the India Office may have something to say about his life and work, his views on political liberty and subjection, the idea of representative government, British imperialism (with particular reference to India), and many of the large number of other subjects on which he penned his thoughts. The standard biography of Mill makes no mention of his time at the India Office, and Bruce Mazlish, in his James and John Stuart Mill, an intellectual psychobiography of father and son, is constrained to admit that "India represents a curious lacunae in John Stuart Mill's intellectual life". The scholarship on Mill, which is very considerable, is predicated largely on the supposition that Mill's work at the India Office was merely a diversion, and that it could not have had any bearing on his work as a well-known public philosopher and political economist; and so a recent assessment maintains the distinction between Mill's career at the India House and his "theoretical priorities in economics and social organisation". Most pointedly, Eric Stokes, in his authoritative study on utilitarianism as an aspect of Britain's policy in India, justified the omission of a serious consideration of John Stuart Mill's role in the creation of Indian policy with the argument that the younger Mill had "neither his father's opportunities nor his bent for the practical realization of the Utilitarian theories".

from Manas

Nutmeg for New York

In 1667, the Dutch traded Manhattan for the island of Run, described by David Quammen as "the world’s most inconspicuous yet eloquent symbol of changing commodity values and myopic diplomacy." Run, a British colonial foothold in the Spice Islands, provided a competitive alternative to the Dutch monopoly on nutmeg.

from Food and Economics blog

The Realist: A Talk with Gianni Amelio

Amelio has tried to do moral cinema, a difficult task anywhere. He's done it for four decades with actors like Lo Verso and Volonté (and plenty of non-professionals) who always have a way of showing, not just what they're doing, but what's being done to them. Isn't this the way that most of life is lived?

Amelio has the eye of an aesthete, but he's is not seduced by the bella figura of language or formal official behavior. Buildings that look elegant are shown to be out of scale. Beauty can easily be a veil for cunning. It can also be shattered by pain. Petty crimes can be conceived and committed in august universities or sacred chapels.

by David D'Arcy for GreenCine

How on earth do we get out of this economic meltdown mess?

While bank nationalisation is probably the “nuclear option”, there are other ideas that could be an improvement on what governments are doing.

“A lot of the focus is on the ‘bad bank’ idea [where a government siphons off toxic assets], but another way would be for the government to stimulate new entry into the banking system,” said Martin Weale, director of Britain’s National Institute of Economic and Social Research.

“If Tesco wanted to come in and enter the banking system by setting up a new bank, it should be encouraged to do so.”

from TimesOnline

Obama’s new deal is the same old blunder

The trouble, 70 years on, is that America’s debt is already enormous, even before Obama’s “jump-start” has begun to hoover up the taxpayers’ trillions.

Perhaps Obama will not repeat some of the errors of the New Deal. Roosevelt (and indeed Hoover) recalled the anger caused by the wage cuts during the depression of 1920-1 and cajoled employers to keep wage rates stable, even as output dropped. This is a policy supported by the Keynesians of today, who argue that lower wages lead to lower demand, which leads to lower output, which leads to more unemployment, and so on ad infinitum.

from TimesOnline

We are the banks

As a nation, our fortunes in 2009 will be conspicuously tied to the fortunes of our banks as never before.

from bbcnews.com

Profile: Bernard Kouchner

The humanitarian activist and former Health Minister Bernard Kouchner is widely admired in France, not least for his passionate, often outspoken declarations on human rights and the need to intervene to protect them.

By creating Medicins Sans Frontieres, "we were establishing the moral right to interfere inside someone else's country", he once told an interviewer.

from bbcnews.com

Count von Rosen and The Babies of Biafra

On May 22, 1969, the Babies of Biafra launched their first attack against Nigeria. The Babies were a fleet of 5 civilian single-engine SAAB aircraft outfitted with unguided rocket launchers. They were going up against an air force composed of MIGs and Ilyushin bombers, flown by English, South African and Egyptian mercenaries. Their leader was Count Carl Gustaf von Rosen, a Swede who was Herman Goering’s nephew-in-law.

Von Rosen began his flying career as a pilot in an aerial circus. When Italy attacked Ethiopia, he began flying Red Cross relief missions carrying food and supplies to the Ethiopian refugees. After the Ethiopian war, he became one of the chief pilots for KLM, leaving them to join the Finnish Air Force when the Winter War with the USSR broke out. When he joined, he presented the Finns with 3 KLM aircraft he had purchased with his own money. He is said to have bombed Soviet forces from a DC-2 airliner by shoving the bombs out the passenger exits. When Germany invaded the Netherlands, Von Rosen tried to join Britain’s RAF but was turned down because of his relationship with Goering. He returned to flying for KLM. His wife joined the Dutch resistance and was killed during the war.

After the war, Von Rosen became an instructor for the Ethiopian Air Force, leaving them to become Dag Hammarskjold's pilot. He was ill the day the UN Secretary General’s airplane crashed under mysterious circumstances during the Congo Crisis.

In August of 1968, Von Rosen flew into San Tomei with a load of medical supplies bound for the new Republic of Biafra. When the mercenaries hired to take the supplies into Biafra aborted their flight, Von Rosen took the supplies into Biafra himself. Once there, he became intrigued with the Biafrans’ plight and came up with the idea behind the babies.

According to some reports, the Babies destroyed several MIG-17 fighters and three of the six Ilyushin bombers owned by the Nigerian Air Force along with the Ughelli power station and air bases at Benin, Enugu and Port Harcouth. Von Rosen left for Sweden shortly after the Ughelli attack, but the Babies flew until Biafra was defeated by Nigeria.

The Nigerian Air Force was notorious for attacking non-military targets (hospitals, refugee camps, civilian relief convoys), but they scored their only victory against the Babies when a MIG followed two Babies back to their base and strafed them after they landed. Both pilots escaped. Only two Baby pilots were lost during the war.

On 13 July 1977, Count Carl Gustaf von Rosen , still flying refugee relief missions, was killed on the ground in Ethiopia during an attack by Somali guerillas.

Defiance - and an apology - as Barclays reveals big profit

Barclay's balance sheet is now larger than the annual output of the entire UK economy after ballooning to more than £2tn in 2008, it revealed yesterday.

As the bank attempted to win over sceptics concerned about potential black holes in its Barclays Capital investment banking division, chief executive John Varley insisted the sheer size of the bank's assets and liabilities would not be a source of instability for the bruised financial system. The annual output of the UK economy is about £1.5tn.

from the Guardian

Jeremy Clarkson apologises for calling Gordon Brown 'a one-eyed idiot'

Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson has apologised for calling the prime minister, Gordon Brown, a "one-eyed Scottish idiot" after a barrage of criticism from politicians and disability groups.

The BBC star, who is currently in Australia on tour, said in a statement: "In the heat of the moment I made a remark about the prime minister's personal appearance for which, upon reflection, I apologise."

Earlier, Clarkson had compared Brown to Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd, after Rudd had just addressed the country on the global financial crisis.

"It's the first time I've ever seen a world leader [Rudd] admit we really are in deep shit," Clarkson was reported as saying in the Australian newspaper.

"He genuinely looked terrified. Poor man, he's actually seen the books. We have this one-eyed Scottish idiot who keeps telling us everything's fine and he's saved the world and we know he's lying, but he's smooth at telling us."

from guardian

Wooing the Israeli youth vote in trendy Tel Aviv

You can live in Tel Aviv and not feel the war that we've just had. It's not the same vibe. People just get on with their lives. It's very bubble. Very bubble.

from the guardian

The fog of cyberwar

Carr points to Russian cyberattacks on Chechnya in 2002 as the first concrete example. "That was more of a true cyberwar. It combined server attacks with a kinetic force - a military invasion. And that was repeated in the Russian invasion of Georgia, in combination with an early network attack."

from the guardian

Suddenly, Just Getting in to Afghanistan is a Problem

More than 80 percent of the supplies for American and coalition forces in Afghanistan flow through Pakistan. Attacks aimed at choking the supply lines have become increasingly frequent and brazen, despite the presence of Pakistani security forces in the area.

from nytimes