Another brick in the wall?

Cameron and Sarkozy have signed a deal to share military resources. It was kept pretty much off the public’s radar until it was a done deal. Did parliament get any say so?

It seems Cameron has locked the UK into it for the next 50 years. It is not clear if it can be got out of.

It is doubtful if any of the UK’s politicians will ever seriously try.

Cameron is busy trying to spin it up into great news and it is for the pro EU political elite.

It is difficult to reconcile this with his earlier bluster about not signing away any more of the UK’s sovereignty without a referendum. But this will be yet another instance where a slight change in the newspeak name of the thing magically utterly transforms it, so an old promise can be safely ignored and discarded. He is taking a leaf out of Gordon Brown’s book, on the Labour Party election lies manifesto.

What it actually is is a tacit acknowledgement that thanks to his incompetent butchery of the UK's defence capability the UK is no longer capable of acting effectively on the world stage without support.

What it actually means is that the UK can now no longer act militarily, in many respects, without France’s agreement.

A mutual defence pact is one thing, even military co-operation, or joint expeditionary forces - but signing over a veto on when you use your military to a foreign power is a whole other ball game, more akin to treason.

Not that UK politicians have not been happily signing away sovereign power for decades, so he can reasonably expect the supine UK electorate to put up with that as they have done with so much else that more self respecting citizens would do something about.

Sadly it is probably unlikely there will ever be a tea party movement in the UK.

What is Cameron’s agenda? One suspects ever closer European integration and the construction of a seed of a EU military. How long before a "money saving treaty" with Germany comes along?

Then there is the argument that can now be used by the political elite that If co-operation works in this areas then why not others? They will then subtly suggest, as they so often do, that it will allow ‘Europe’ to be more ‘independent’ of the US.

US politicians still somehow happily seem to imagine the EU is an unmitigated good thing for the US, despite plenty of evidence to the contrary. Is it that they think they know the nature of the beast? It wasn’t so long ago they thought it was a good idea to fund the Taliban...

Welcom to A new US president

Today is the inauguration of President Elect Obama as the 44th President of the United States of America. Arguably one of the most powerful offices on the planet.

There is an incredible optimism associated with this particular inauguration. It is seen as a sea change in US politics and society. It is doubly poignant as it comes after Martin Luther King Jnr’s day and is in many respects the realisation of his dream.

Everyone speaks of a black president. As someone pointed out to me it is largely in people’s minds. Barak Obama is in fact 50% black and that somehow makes him just “black”. You could use the same logic to say he was “White”.

Whatever, many people have invested a huge amount of hope in him. Maybe they should dial back on that just a little? He is human, not a superman. He does not have a magic wand.

If people build him up unrealistically in their minds they are likely to be correspondingly unrealistically disappointed if he can’t deliver on their every wish.

So here is a hope that people don’t expect too much and too fast and then get annoyed if he can’t do miracles. Especially with all the troubles the world is beset with right now.

Between Memorial Bridge and Arlington Cemetery, there is an inscription on the memorial to the Seabees, the U.S. Navy Construction Battalions. It says:

“The difficult we do immediately. The impossible takes a little longer.”

Girl Power?

It is interesting to note that Obama was doing well, in front in the polls…

Until Palin became a factor...

Now the race for the Whitehouse appears to be far more even. She appears to strike a chord with many voters. It will be interesting to see how things pan out.

Obama threatens Pakistan over al-Qaeda

It seems Barack Obama is getting overly feisty in his efforts to get himself the Democrat ticket.

Talking about possible terrorist targets in Pakistan he said: "If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will,"

Nice to know how concerned he is over national sovereignty. He’ll play along giving it lip service - as long as he can get his own way. But if he is baulked then an act of war is presumably not out of the question.

Pakistan’s President Musharraf has certain difficulties dealing with al-Qaeda and Taliban militants in areas bordering Afghanistan. They are wild and in many respects virtually autonomous, controlled by tribes.

I hope Mr Obama is only trying to sound tough and hoping this will play to the domestic hawks, but the fact is President Musharraf has been a key US ally in it’s ‘war on terror’ since 9/11 and this is the thanks he gets.

Obama’s grandstanding makes him look pretty feeble to his own people and doesn’t seem likely to exactly strengthen his hand domestically.

It is also enough to make everyone else think twice. On the face of it Obama seems to think, if the rest of the world doesn’t jump when he says frog then some ass kicking ‘military intervention’ may be in order.

Stoneridge case could damage US trade

The US isn’t big on welfare, but then who needs welfare (state sanctioned theft) when you have dubious class-action compensation (court sanctioned theft)?

The Supreme Court is now considering whether third-party suppliers, legal firms, accountants, or banks that have dealt with the offending companies could be sucked in through that connection and end up facing claims, with the offenders, from defrauded investors and shareholders.

Scientific-Atlanta is being sued for supplying cable TV boxes to Stoneridge, a company that is alleged to have filed false financial statements.

Stoneridge's shareholders were unwise, or unlucky, in that they invested in Stoneridge and then failed, or were unable, to keep a sufficient eye on what was going on.

Now either the securities fraud was sufficiently obvious for the shareholders to be irresponsible not to have seen it, or sufficiently well hidden to be more likely to fool a third party supplier to a company, than it’s own shareholders. In either case it is dubious practice to try to extract ‘compensation’ from third party suppliers in these circumstances.

It's wrong if Shareholders have been ripped off. But it is also wrong if they should seek to make up that loss from some innocent third party.

This lot though? They need ‘compensation’ so they sued, not only their company bosses and accountants - They also went after the unfortunate suppliers of the cable boxes, claiming that they effectively took part.

If the Supreme Court rules in favour of the plaintiffs in the case, it will be an invitation to "abusive litigation" and given that possible payouts are up there with national lottery wins companies have to settle out of court, adding a massive financial burden to business costs.

John Engler, President of the National Association of Manufacturers, pointed out that a victory for the plaintiffs would give "unscrupulous lawyers a hunting licence to stalk any company that did any business with any publicly traded firm".

A recent study showed the excessive risk of litigation was already the main reason foreign companies declined to join the New York stock exchange.

Peter Wallison, of the American Enterprise Institute, said: "For the New York Stock Exchange, this is like going bullfighting with your cape behind your back. It will drive up the cost of doing business here.". He explained, if suppliers and advisers can be dragged into class actions, it would then no longer even be necessary to issue shares in the US to incur securities liability.

Any firm, anywhere, doing business with American companies would be taking the risk that the transaction could later be portrayed as fraudulent, or deceptive.

If this case goes the way the plaintiffs want you could end up with a UK company being sued by shareholders of a US company simply because they may have supplied a chip to the US company. An enormous disincentive for the rest of the world to avoid dealing with US firms.

Happy July 4th - Enjoy the Holiday.

…We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal,
that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,
that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness-That to
secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving
their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any
Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of
the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government…

July 4, 1776. A DECLARATION

Happy July the 4th America.

French Kissing Cyber bullying in the USA

It seems teachers in the UK are not the only ones being cyber ‘bullied’.

While teenagers still think that most bullying happens offline, one third of online teenagers in the US have reportedly been cyber-bullied, according to the Pew Internet Project .

The most common complaint from teens, was about private information being shared, rather than direct threats.

One has to question exactly what they are counting as bullying. Is it the perception, or do they have a list and does it actually include things that most people would not even consider bullying?

Though it may not necessarily be the case here, I have seen some surveys where the criteria were dubious, to say the least, effectively designed to maximise the response.

According to this report, girls were more likely to be bullied than boys. Girls tend to network more, so that makes sense. People who share their identities online were apparently the most vulnerable.

Some 32% of teenagers questioned had experienced one, or more, of the following:

• Receiving an aggressive email, IM or text message.
  
• Having a rumour spread about them online or having.
  
• Having a private e-mail, instant message, or text messaging forwarded, or posted where others could see it.
  
• Having an embarrassing photograph posted online without permission.
  

The last two are a bit ambiguous. The more sensitive, the more likely to experience bullying if it is intended, or not.

This from a 16 year old girl certainly fits the bill:
"There's this boy in my anatomy class who everybody hates and some girl started up this I Hate [Name] MySpace thing. So everybody in school goes on it to say bad things about this boy."

I guess the one who started that - and the ones that joined in - never heard of Columbine High School, or Virginia Tech...

According to Secret service investigators, many of the shooters in those situations had feelings of alienation, or persecution, that eventually drove them to violence.

Iran Charges Iranian-American Academics as spies

It looks as if Iran is continuing it policy of – well government (or at lest factions within it) sanctioned hostage taking, for want of a better term.

Having ‘arrested’ and humiliated British navy personnel. Iran has also decided to detain and charge two well known Iranian - American academics Haleh Esfandiari and Kian Tajbaksh as spies.

Haleh Esfandiari is 67 years old and works in Washington, running the Middle East department of the Woodrow Wilson centre there. She made the mistake of visiting her elderly mother in Iran.
Esfandiari has been prevented from leaving Iran since December last year, after having her passports stolen by, ‘mysterious unidentified gunmen’ on her way to the airport to return to the US.

Kian Tajbaksh the other academic and social scientist had done work for the Open Society Institute of George Soros - an organisation Iran says was trying to instigate a "velvet revolution" to topple the clerical regime.

An official spokesman stated they had both now been formally charged with spying, acting against Iran's national security - and conducting propaganda against the Islamic Republic. They appear to have been imprisoned in an intelligence ministry facility. No date for trial has been announced.

Another Iranian - American academic, Ali Shakeri, mysteriously disappeared in Iran earlier this month. The judicial authorities are currently denying any knowledge of him, but a well known newspaper has indicated he also has been arrested.

According to the BBC these arrests have sparked unease in Iran, many in contact with westerners now fear they may also be accused of spying. Concerns about this have prompted other Iranians to abandon trips - worried they too will not be safe.

The charges appear rather spurious and one suspects their possession of American Passports may have more to do with their misfortunes than anything else.

Apparently an unidentified Iranian official, from the dangerously powerful intelligence ministry, suggested, during a briefing with Iranian journalists, that western intelligence agencies were using academic contacts to persuade scholars into espionage. He said seminars inside and outside the country were used.

"We are worried about many academic conferences which foreigners attend and establish relations. Any foreigner who establishes relations is not trustworthy. Through their approaches, they first establish an academic relationship but this soon changes into an intelligence relationship.”

"Some conversations which take place under the auspices of academic or scientific interviews are pretexts for getting close to the country's scientific figures. Unfortunately some decent individuals fall into the trap of these plots."

The official went on to make claims that Iran had uncovered a CIA/MI5 run spy network within Iraq that was planning bombings, assassinations and kidnappings.

That will be the 67 year old Ms Haleh Esfandiari then... spare time bomber and assassin? - If you believe that I have some valuable share certificates in a Bolivian gold mining venture you may be interested in purchasing, or I will when I print them off...

Worryingly the intelligence official suggested many Iranians were involved.

It looks as if the intelligence ministry may be getting set for either a purge of academics, or to suppress any independent thought by threatening one.