If you think you've got problems...

...consider the case of Mamusu Thoronka, a mother in Sierra Leone trying to look after six children with half a hand.

Doctrine not changed since the 1840s

"The [US] has never taken counterinsurgency seriously. The Army's doctrine hasn't changed since the 1840's." - John Waghelstein, a retired colonel in the Special Forces who helped to conduct the American-backed counterinsurgency campaign in El Salvador, quoted in The Fall of the Warrior King.

One of the most telling lines from Lt. Col. Nathan Sassaman, the star soldier and quarterback, is "Don't they have those people [who do nation-building] at the State Department?"

Well, yes, exactly.

(see also Leadership Failure, from Human Rights Watch)

Tien Shan, apples and bees

"[On] the [northern slopes of the ] Tien Shan (Heavenly Mountains) that stretch from Uzbekistan eastwards over the border of China...the sweet apple, Malus pumila, evolved over a period of up to twelve million years. It then took some 7000 years to travel to the west and finish up on supermarket shelves.

There is...plenty of evidence that other species of bee... played a much greater role in the origin of the apple [than the honey bee]...[solitary bees such as] Leaf cutter and mason bees (including Osmia)...[are] much better evolved for the transfer of pollen in an apple flower.

Osmia starts work earlier in the season [than honey bees], gets up earlier, does not take lunch breaks...and, it is estimated, one red mason bee (Osmia rufa a [UK] native) can do the work of 120 honey-bees".

Barrie Juniper author of The Story of the Apple (Timber Press, Oregon, forthcoming), writing in the Marcher Apple Network Newsletter no. 11, Summer 2005

"Throwing grenades around in the cockpit of the world economy"

"When we as historians get access to all the documents and can figure out how this thing was planned and who supported it, I think we'll find that the Bush administration was a coalition of various forces and each part of the coalition had its own reasons for wanting to fight this war. The group most explored has been the neoconservatives, but I suspect they will bulk less large in our final estimation of the promotion of the war. They weren't in command positions for the most part. They were in positions to make an argument. They may also have been fall guys. When things started going bad, more stuff got leaked about what they had been saying than about others.

...The guerrilla movement destroys infrastructure deliberately. Electricity facilities, petroleum pipelines, rail transport. And it deliberately baits the U.S. military in the cities, basing its fighters in civilian neighborhoods in hopes that a riposte will cause damage, because Iraqis, even urban ones, are organized by clan. Clan vendettas are still an important part of people's sense of honor. So when the American military kills an Iraqi, I figure they've made enemies of five siblings and twenty-five first cousins who feel honor-bound to get revenge. The Sunni Arab guerrilla movement has taken advantage of that sense of clan honor gradually to turn the population against the United States. Many more Sunni Arabs are die-hard opposed to the U.S. presence in Iraq now than was the case a year ago, and there were more a year ago than the year before that".

- Juan Cole, speaking to Tom Englehardt (interview, part one)

"People say the most amazing things. Like, 'Well, Iraq is already in civil war, so why would it matter if we left?' No! No! No! This is the stage before proper civil war. The difference is a matter of scale. You have hundreds of people a week being killed by guerrilla violence in Iraq. That's different from thousands of people, or tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands. I mean we've seen it in other countries -- Cambodia, Afghanistan, Congo -- you can lose a fifth of the population in this kind of struggle. I think it's outrageous that people would say, 'Let's just up and leave and let what happens happen.' I know the Bush administration has mismanaged this thing so badly that one's tempted to say, let's get them away from this before they do any more damage, but do we want a genocide on our conscience?

...I know one person who said, 'Well, once we're out, whatever happens is not our responsibility.' Is it really true? You can invade a country, overthrow its government, dissolve its military, and then walk away, and a million people die, and that's not your problem? I don't understand this way of thinking".

- Juan Cole, speaking to Tom Englehardt (interview, part two)

No Hope

"In order to receive ongoing funding from [the US President's Emergency Plan for Aids Relief], organizations like [Hope Worldwide, a US-based Christian charity] must meet their targets—however empty. Their predicament reminded me of Nikolai Gogol's novel Dead Souls, in which the main character, a minor nobleman named Chichikov, travels through the countryside, trying to purchase the names of dead serfs from local landowners, reasoning that landowners would be only too happy to hand over the names of serfs who had died between one census and another, because then they wouldn't have to pay taxes on them. Chichikov planned to mortgage the dead serfs to an unsuspecting bank, which—thinking the serfs were alive—would give Chichikov a loan with which he could build a real fortune of his own. Hope's strategy of leveraging the names of children for future gain seemed to me similar". Helen Epstein: The Lost Children of AIDS.

"Investigative reporting is not stenography"

Queen Maureen on the "Becky Sharp of the Fourth Estate": Woman of Mass Destruction.

Robber baron?

"Philip Green has banked £1.2bn (approx US$2.1bn)…the biggest pay cheque in British corporate history…and more than four times the [Arcadia] group’s pre-tax profits of £253m".

"[Arcadia’s] balance sheet bears the scars of a statutory net debt now standing at more than £1.3bn. A business which boasted net assets of £303m in August 2004 now has net liabilities of £807m".

Energy and capital in the UK

Shortages in gas supplies to the UK prompt Digby Jones to call for action...to increase supply and improve infrastructure for delivery, of course, rather than efficiency of use. Whatever, there's money to be made in the present climate, as the competitive bidding for (coal-fired) Drax by three consortia shows. The current chairmain and former chief executive stand to make around £30m from the sale of an asset paid for by the taxypayer (CEGB).

Grandchildren of the revolution

"Who or what could give [the theocratic Iranian] regime renewed popular support among the young? 'Only the United States!' " (Timothy Garton Ash - Soldiers of the Hidden Imam)

See also Shaul Bakhash.

"Strongest on record"

That's Wilma. See Kerry Emmanuel's FAQ on hurricanes and global warming.

(Elsewhere, interesting data on ocean temperature changes that - reportedly - was not quite as expected)

Kuna

Brain coral and mola (cloth pattern) from the Kuna.

Famine and democracy in Africa

In a contribution to an oD forum, I wrote that I would bet that Amartya Sen's general point about democracy and famine holds for Africa as much as anywhere else, and that the more democratic an African country is the less likely there is to be famine that kills.

Could the current situation in Malawi be seen as a test case for this? There may be a danger of looking through the wrong end of a telescope in the sense that the terms may be too abstract and remote. In Malawi, as elsewhere, one would need to break down what one really means by "democracy" - the strengths and weaknesses of formal institutions, media, civil society and so on - not to speak of the role of unelected international organisations.

Matthew Lockwood argues that de facto one-party states in Africa offer the best chance to contain patronage and create developmental states.

Two Lithuanians under a buddleia bush

Nick Davies on Britain's "new underclass".

British and Nigerian corruption

"Nigeria is this week due to enter final talks to win $18bn of debt relief in the biggest ever write-off by the Paris Club of western creditors.

...Amid the mutual congratulation, it is worth taking a moment to compare the impressive-sounding numbers with another figure that originates in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation. It is the estimated $3.5m or more worth of crude oil that is stolen each day from the Niger Delta by conspiracies of government officials, militias, the military and expatriates. On an annual basis, the value of that theft would exceed the debt repayment saving.

...Britain has not tried to hide its double standards. The Commission for Africa set up and chaired by Mr Blair to devise an agenda for the G8 summit highlighted the failure of rich country export credit agencies to tackle corruption. Yet Britain’s Export Credits Guarantee Department has shown little inclination to follow up allegations that a consortium including MW Kellogg, a client, agreed to pay $170m of bribes to secure billions of dollars of work on a giant Nigerian gas plant".

Michael Peel - UK and Nigeria’s half-hearted war on corruption, FT 17 Oct

Friends like these

Football fatwa

This should rank alongside the Ayatollah Khomeini Book of Jokes.

Why not bomb them today?

"The most important event of the second half of the 20th century is one that didn't happen." - Tim Harford quotes Thomas Schelling in an introduction to his work.

An unstated question, but ones that presumably occupies Schelling's fellow prize winner and others, is whether uncertainty about the use of nuclear weapons in the Middle East enhances or reduces stability.

Harford also notes:

"Schelling has involved himself in the debate on climate change. Often painted as a straightforward sceptic, his views are far more subtle. A short essay he wrote in 2002 for Foreign Policy argued for immediate action ..., but he also – as always – looked at the problem with fresh eyes, emphasising the fact that the climate change debate was fundamentally an argument about sharing costs and benefits."

The great confusion

"If you have a sign out for the sermon 'Our obligation to the poor,' you won't get anybody. If you have a sign out for 'The Internet and the Antichrist,' you'll bring them in" - Prof Craig C. Hill quoted by Michael Luo in Doomsday: The Latest Word if Not the Last.

Publish and be damned

"This is extremely foolish. The genome is essentially the design of a weapon of mass destruction. No responsible scientist would advocate publishing precise designs for an atomic bomb, and in two ways revealing the sequence for the flu virus is even more dangerous".

Ray Kurzweil and Bill Joy on the publication of the full genome of the 1918 influenza virus on the Internet in the GenBank database by the United States Department of Health and Human Services.

Apple pie

Varieties of apples displayed in the Great Barn at Hellens at the Big Apple festival in Much Marcle, Herefordshire this weekend.

They are just part of the range of fruits recorded in the Herefordshire Pomona, and brought to prominence by the Marcher Apple Network.

As you can see from the lower photograph, the members of this sinister network are fomenting a conspiracy to undermine the Western way of life by nibbling away at the profits of leading corporations - and hence our very sense of what we are. If ever there was a case for preventive action , this is it.