Truck and Barter

Britain could annex Maldives territory?

Former Attorney General recently warned;

The former Attorney General told an opposition rally last night Britain may take exclusive control of forty square miles of Indian Ocean off the Maldives south coast, because the Government has failed to contest a legal claim dating back to the 1990s.

Yesterday he told a rally of opposition parties that the Maldives Government had failed to contest a claim by the UK Government to all waters within a two hundred mile radius of a British base on Diego Garcia, which intrudes into Maldivian waters by forty square miles...

The former Attorney General said the Finance Ministry had refused his department’s request to pay legal fees of $1,000 a day and the President’s Office had instructed him to seek foreign aid.

“The Government only finds money when it wants to, for example to build the nine storey police headquarters,” he told an audience of over a thousand in the Dhaarubaruge conference centre.

Related;
Key military outposts

Podcasts

Altruism
The term altruism was coined by the 19th century sociologist Auguste Comte and is derived from the Latin “alteri” or "the others”. It describes an unselfish attention to the needs of others. Comte declared that man had a moral duty to “serve humanity, whose we are entirely.” The idea of altruism is central to the main religions: Jesus declared “you shall love your neighbour as yourself” and Mohammed said “none of you truly believes until he wishes for his brother what he wishes for himself”. Buddhism too advocates “seeking for others the happiness one desires for oneself.”…
If both mankind and the natural world are selfishly seeking to promote their own survival and advancement, how can we explain being kind to others, sometimes at our own expense? How have philosophical ideas about altruism responded to evolutionary theory? And paradoxically, is it possible that altruism can, in fact, be selfish? Contributors include Miranda Fricker, Senior Lecturer in the School of Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London, Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologist and the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University and John Dupré, Professor of Philosophy of Science at Exeter University and director of Egenis, the ESRC Centre for Genomics in Society (from BBC’s In Our Time).

Niall Ferguson: The War of the World
The 20th century was a period of unprecedented economic growth and scientific discovery, but equally a century of unparalleled bloodshed and warfare - estimates suggest that 1 in every 22 deaths in the 20th century were the result of violence. Niall Ferguson argues that the intensity of the 'hundred years war' can be explained by the factors of ethnic disintegration, economic volatility, and empires in decline - forces which are to be found behind sites of contemporary conflict, notably the Middle East.

Can chocolate cure hypochondria?
Associate Professor in Latin Humanism Yasmin Haskell from the University of Western Australia talks about the history of hypochondria and benefits of chocolate.

Des Moore on Milton Friedman
“Why was Friedman so influential? It was not due to esoteric analyses of economic theory accepted in academia. He did very little of this and many academics resented his rebuttals of the merits of government intervention. His influence came importantly from his ability to explain and defend his beliefs in terms that were comprehensible and persuasive to the layman. His constant theme that adoption of free market policies were in the interests of the common man helped enormously.”

Carbon trading

Humour, learning and kids

Utility of Force- General Sir Rupert Smith (ret., British Army)

The Long War General John Philip Abizaid, Commander of U.S. CENTCOM

A Conversation with Akbar Ganji and Martha Nussbaum

Democracy Amercian and British style

Egyptian Book of the Dead

Does raising the miminum wage help the poor?

Private equity - the purest capitalism
Related blog- Going Private

How to Make Money – from War

The Guardian reports;

“Armor Group International, the security firm that makes most of its profits in Iraq, reported a drop in earnings for the first half of the year because of increased competition for business and the loss of a major training contract in Iraq.

The London-based company reported a 30% rise in sales to $134.4m in the six months to June 30. Armor generated more than half of its revenues from business in Iraq - $70.3m - although its non-Iraq business grew by 57%.

However, pre-tax profits slipped to $3.7m from $4.7m for the same period a year ago. Analysts had expected profits to be only 10% lower than last year's.

Armor is chaired by Sir Malcolm Rifkind, the former Conservative foreign and defence secretary. It is one of the UK's leading providers of private security for reconstruction workers in Iraq.

"The group has achieved strong revenue growth over the first half, and we are encouraged by the significant growth outside Iraq," said Dave Seaton, the chief excecutive officer.

The main hit to sales was from the loss of a $7.8m contract with the United States for training staff at the ministry of justice in Iraq, the company told Reuters. "It was a one-off programme funded by the US," Mr Seaton said. "The Iraqi government does not have the funding for its own training needs."

Armor is diversifying and has new or extended contracts providing security at the World Bank headquarters in Kabul, Afghanistan; clearing land mines in southern Sudan, and doing security work for oil and gas companies.”

I wouldn't be worried so much as Failed States in the world seems to be increasing according to this World Bank report.

Related;

World Bank Lists Failing Nations That Can Breed Global Terrorism;

“The number of weak and poorly governed nations that can provide a breeding ground for global terrorism has grown sharply over the past three years, despite increased Western efforts to improve conditions in such states, according to a new World Bank report.

"Fragile" countries, whose deepening poverty puts them at risk from terrorism, armed conflict and epidemic disease, have jumped to 26 from 17 since the report was last issued in 2003. Five states graduated off the list, but 14 made new appearances, including Nigeria and seven other African countries, Kosovo, Cambodia, East Timor, and the West Bank and Gaza. Twelve states, including Afghanistan, Somalia and Sudan, made both lists.”

Linguistic Abuse

Stephen Poole, author of Unspeak,

“In December 2002, two prisoners at the US base in Bagram, Afghanistan, died after trauma to their legs of such severity that the coroners compared it to the results of being run over by a bus. The subsequent official investigation was nothing if not creative. The death of one was explained in this way:

'No one blow could be determined to have caused the death,' the former senior staff lawyer at Bagram, Col. David L. Hayden, said he had been told by the Army's lead investigator. ‘It was reasonable to conclude at the time that repetitive administration of legitimate force resulted in all the injuries we saw'.

The logic of this is startling. You may compare it in some ways to the Chinese method of execution, used until 1905, known as 'death by a thousand cuts'. Since no one cut can be determined to cause death, no one is responsible for the killing. Similar is the principle behind the firing squad: everyone fires at the same time and one soldier has a blank, so no one soldier can be sure that he killed his comrade. But at least in these two cases the intention is avowedly to cause death. To use the argument as an excuse for 'accidental' extrajudicial killing is different. It is perhaps more like a sophistic application of Zeno's paradox of motion. Since at every place in the flight of an arrow it can be considered at rest, an infinite number of such points of rest cannot possibly add up to travel, so the arrow does not actually move and can never reach its target. Similarly, no number of 'legitimate' things can ever add up to something that is illegitimate. It's just one of those unfortunate things.

But this is deliberate linguistic misdirection. The insertion of the word 'legitimate' before 'force' aims exactly to pre-empt the question of legitimacy. Even if one allows that some force might be legitimate, you're dissuaded from wondering whether a repetitive sequence of legitimate blows can be illegitimate. That principle is common in other areas of law: repetitively playing your music too loud can add up to a disturbance of the peace. 'Legitimate' force also implies that the victim had been found guilty of a crime deserving of violent punishment; but the dead prisoners had never had a trial.

The argument is weak on a more physical level, too. If I tap you lightly on the head a hundred times, you may become very annoyed, but this will not add up to crushing your skull. Equally, repeated light blows to the thighs will not add up to crushing them as though you had been run over by a bus. The 'legitimate force' in these blows must in truth be fierce. And so the whole defence does nothing but beg the question of legitimacy itself.

In fact the blows to the legs were not mild slaps but what's called 'peroneal strikes', a deliberately disabling strike to the side of the leg, just above the knee, which targets the peroneal nerve. One of the former police officers who trained the guards in this technique said that it would 'tear up' a prisoner's legs if used repeatedly. A military policeman at the base, Specialist Jones, testified as to how entertaining it was to brutalise a detainee in this way and hear him cry out to his god: 'It became a kind of running joke, and people kept showing up to give this detainee a common peroneal strike just to hear him scream out "Allah," he said. 'It went on over a 24-hour period, and I would think that it was over 100 strikes.'

Inflicting pain for its comic value might not be many people's idea of 'legitimate force'. By the time the man who so amused the Military Police died, most interrogators at the base had concluded that he was an innocent taxi driver.

The word 'administration', meanwhile, is another example of the bureaucratisation of the language of violence. Medicine is administered; civil government is administration. Punishment is administered only after due process. To call the beating of an unconvicted prisoner the 'administration' of force is already to approve of it, by describing it in the language of official sanction. The very phrase 'repetitive administration' is designed to coat the mind in grey cotton-wool, to conjure vistas of endless similar days in fluorescent-lit offices, and thus to mask the reality of brutal violence inflicted for sadistic enjoyment. In the end, the best translation of Colonel Hayden's words is: 'Yes, we beat these men to death, but we have determined that we had the right to do so.'

Related;
Listen to the above podcast.
Steven Poole explains his book.
Bjorn Lomborg’s false dichotomies
In U.S. Report, Brutal Details of 2 Afghan Inmates' Deaths
Army Faltered in Investigating Detainee Abuse
Two Point Scales
We must talk
Fiasco- Interview with the author (listen to his comment about one excellent senior military official named McMaster and his approach in the unit, around the middle of the program);

“I was struck at how successful the 101st Airborne was in Mosul in 2003-04. And some units showed remarkable improvement--the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment had a mediocre first tour of duty in Iraq, but when it went back in 2005 for a second tour, it did extremely well. Col. H.R. McMaster, the regimental commander (and author of a very good book about the Vietnam War, Dereliction of Duty) told his troops that, "Every time you disrespect an Iraqi, you are working for the enemy." I was especially struck by how his regiment handled its prisoners--it even had a program called "Ask the Customer" that quizzed detainees when they were released about whether they felt treated well. This recognized the lesson of past wars that the best way to end an insurgency is to get its leaders to put down their guns and enter the political system, and to get the rank-and-file to desert or switch sides. But it will be harder to discuss the sewage system with the new mayor next year if your troops beat him in his cell when he was your prisoner last year.”

Salon exclusive: The Abu Ghraib files

More Women in Combat?

Via Drudge, we find that the U.S. Army has decided to put scarce resources to better uses:

The Army is negotiating with civilian leaders about eliminating a women-in-combat ban so it can place mixed-sex support companies within warfighting units, starting with a division going to Iraq in January.

Despite the legal prohibition, Army plans already have included such collocation of women-men units in blueprints for a lighter force of 10 active divisions, according to Defense Department sources.

An Army spokesman yesterday, in response to questions from The Washington Times, said the Army is now in discussions with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's staff to see whether the 10-year-old ban in this one area should be lifted. The ban prohibits the Army from putting women in units that "collocate" with ground combatants.

So we've finally come to the point where the aims of equality and lethality are beginning to merge; as the personnel readiness of ground combatants in Iraq continues to erode, the opportunity costs of gender separation are starting to look temptingly large.

The Army is not seeking to lift the ban on women in direct combat units, such as infantry or armor.

What is being examined is the part of the exclusion rule that says mixed-sex support companies may not be positioned with ground combat teams.

In the disputed instance, the transformation plan of Gen. Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, calls for creating Forward Support Companies, which are made up of men and women. These companies would collocate with reconnaissance squadrons, which are combat units and are part of larger brigade "units of action."

In my opinion, it's far easier to slowly change the roles of soldiers so that women can fill them all, than to keep the roles and insist that women be allowed to assume them... even though this amounts to the same thing.