"I can not hear you over the sound of my own awesomness"

This slogan was rather amusingly scribbled over a photo of Blackwater security contractor, and then stuck up on the wall of a work space at a U.S. military base in Baghdad. When it comes to Blackwater and there ilk, there are all sorts of interesting and important discussions to be had about the privatization of security in an era of globalization; the renunciation by states of holding the legitimate monopoly on violence as they outsource war to commercial operations; the position of private military companies in international law; blah blah blah. But I'm not now interested in that. Rather I'm interested in ideas of sartorial elegance in the age of modern global mayhem. Last year I asked why do all wannabe terrorists need to wear leather fingerless gloves? Now we want to know - what is it about private military contractors and dodgy goatee beards?

The guy in the middle is a journo so his dodgy mustache doesn't count.

And if you are still not convinced try clicking this link, or this, or this, or this, or this, or this or this (oh, the fun you can have with Google Images!).

Anyway, I think I have made my point.

Sunny autumn days

Cool and sunny autumn days are my favourite for rock climbing. Getting numb finger tips a little is a fair trade off against the sweaty-palmed slipperiness of high summer. Yesterday at Haukkakallio was a grand day, about 4 degrees, but not a cloud to be seen or a breath of wind. The cliff is rapidly becoming the best cliff on the south coast of Finland, with already about 40 or 50 routes ranging from Vdiff (Finnish 3+) to Rami's masterful creation, King's Cross, which is 8a+, but on trad gear, and Rami led it placing the gear as he went - so presumably in E7 6c territory?

Uncle Tony's Testimonial VS 4c

Jody's recently bolted "Air Arete" 5+, a fine and rather odd sports route. Physically easy but very fall off-able. A bit like a rounded gritstone arete, just with bolts.

Fresh coffee at the crag courtesy of my new and pretty cool stove. And yes that is a nut key, I remembered everything but a spoon.

Aussie Simon stylin' on the first ascent of "Simon Says", Finnish 6+, E2 5c-ish?

The Road to Zion VS 4c

And just to be very web 2.0, here is the movie version of the day. I'm in two minds as to whether to buy a cheap digi video camera to get better quality film clips than my little digi camera manages, but then I might just be more encouraged to release more of my "creativity" onto the world and perhaps it doesn't really need that.

It was great to see another team of four there repeating all of our routes and seeming to enjoy them. I'm sorry I didn't get your names guys - but if you contact me by either leaving a comment here, or via a message through the Slouppi forums, I can send you copies of the various pics I took of you lot.

Sunday morning godless heathen post

On Sunday mornings more American go to church than in any other advanced democracy worldwide, but the standard narrative of Religious Right is that the country is becoming godless, and that Christianity is under attack. But did you know that in the 1770s only 17% Americans were church-goers? I didn't until I happened to listen to this interesting interview with Prof. Gary Wills of Northwestern University in the U.S. He points out that America was really at its least religious at its founding and that religious observance has increased in waves ever since, although interestingly there has always been a secular push-back after each of these evangelical waves. It's worth a listen if you are interested in the role of religion in state formation and politics (the 17% quote about 5 minutes into the interview).

The wrong lobby

Waltz and Mearsheimer have become internationally famous for their Israel Lobby article which has now been published as book. This ain't bad going for international relations (IR) professors, a job that whilst respected rarely catapults you stardom (Condoleezza Rice being an obvious exception). It's important to realise that within IR they are the big men of the Realist school of the thought - that countries have national interests and act in accordance to them. All classic power politics stuff. The problem is that they keep getting it wrong. They didn't see the end of the cold war coming, they didn't see the pacification of Europe, and its gradual union via the EU. Indeed in the early post-coldwar era Mearsheimer was recommending that Germany builds nuclear weapons to balance the threat from France! He felt that only if states had a balance of power would the system be stable. So wrong, wrong, then wrong again. How, then, were they to explain the U.S. picking on its own terms, on its own timetable, to invade Iraq and plunge the country into the biggest military crisis since Vietnam? Well they couldn't - because it is, particularly in retrospect, such a dumb thing for America to have done. So if the administration hadn't been acting in the U.S. national interest, why did they go into Iraq? Because they were tricked - by the Israel Lobby. This is essentially the core argument of the Israel Lobby.

You shouldn't throw the bath water out with the baby though: their essential point was wrong - that a domestic lobby for a foreign power could persuade the US to act against its own interests - but they make very many good points about the influence and power of the pro-Israel lobbies (plural being more accurate) in the US, and particularly the lack of debate in the US media on Israel. In fact if you want to hear all sides of the story, you would do much better following the vigorous and nuanced debate that takes place in Israel itself, rather than in America.

In the hue and cry that followed the articles publications one of the more interesting comments was made by Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s national-security adviser. He said that the Israel lobby does exist, and that it is influential in Washington, but it was only one of various successful national lobbies. Equal to the pro-Israel lobby was in his opinion the Cuban-American lobby and the Armenian lobby, with the Greek and Taiwanese groups not far behind.

It Waltz and Mearsheimer want an example of a national lobby exerting its influence in a way that is pushing the U.S. in a policy clearly at odd with its immediate interests, they should have taken the Armenians. The ongoing attempt to get both houses of the US Congress to condemn as genocide the Armenian massacres by Ottoman Turkey in 1915, is exactly that. The declaration might have a noble intent, but it will never be anything but symbolic. What is not in doubt is that the implications are that U.S.-Turkish relations are going down the pan.

29.8 kmph (again) and the dangers of sports nutrition

(Photo: strawberry power gel - not very nice in either direction) I went for a quick ride on my road bike this evening. I was meant to go out mountain biking with a mate, but when I spoke to him on Saturday evening he was already down town with another of our mates and I just knew, that despite his enthusiasm at that moment, there was a good chance the idea wouldn't seem so great for him the next morning. He still hadn't called me by lunch time today so I decided to call him. He sounded reasonably chipper, but claimed that climbing and some physical work the day before had made him achy so he would give the biking a miss. He also denied that the five beers and a bottle of vodka they had drunk in his camper van on arrival in the city, before even getting to a bar, had nothing to do with it. I remain slightly sceptical.

Anyway - back to the ride. It's really annoying as it is a shortish ride, just over 20 kms, and I was trying hard to do it at an average speed of 30 kmph. But just like back in the early summer, although the computer was saying well over an av speed of 30 on the downhills it would dip back into the twenties on the climbs. I really went for it climbing back up from the river towards home, to the extent that I managed to get that horrible vomit-in-the-mouth feeling when you think you are about hurl your last meal (in this case strawberry-flavoured power gel, which - believe me - doesn't taste much better going down than it does coming back up). I managed to avoid puking and tried to sprint the last couple of kms along the flat - yet to no avail. When I was a kid I was totally uncompetitive in anything to do with sports, it is an odd habit to develop against yourself as you approach middle age!
(Photo right - eating power gel on your bike may make you look like this - although probably not. But who says advertising doesn't work? We can all dream)

Typo or Freudian slip?

Below is the text of an email that I've just sent to Helsingin Sanomat International Edition, noting an amusing typo they have in their story about the Finnish prime minister answering questions from the public. I'll link the story but they might have corrected the typo by the time you read it, so the joke was that they had written treat when they meant threat. The email was as follows:

In today’s article about Vanhanen answering internet chat questions you have the slightly amusing typo: “Vanhanen insisted that joining NATO is not currently topical, according to existing policy, because the EU is able to support its member states through all possible means, if there is a treat to security.”

I expect the EU could support Finland if someone wants to give us security treats, (air-to-surface guided munitions perhaps?) whilst on the other hand the EU is of absolutely no use if there is a security threat. The Prime Minister might wish it so, but this will not make it so. No one outside of Finland takes the idea seriously. Indeed neither do many officials inside Finland when they are not speaking on the record.

Best,

Toby.

Israeli politics briefing

Tel Aviv from the air

The domestic setting to Israeli foreign policy is often ignored internationally or at least underplayed. My PhD work is basically an argument that you can't separate domestic and international politics (although my case-study is Finland not Israel), particularly not in the globalised world, and this is as true of Israel as anywhere else. Hence what follows is my take on the discussions and briefings we had with policymakers, academics, journalists and others on my recent visit to Israel.

The Israeli economy is hugely successful with growth being driven by high-technology industries, in which the IDF has cleverly involved itself. But this is leading to what a number of speakers called the core-periphery issue (and this is clearly seen by both the left and right) in which certain sectors of Israeli society have missed the high-tech boat and are now being left ever further behind. The periphery has ethnic, religious and geographical aspects to it. A major distinction within Israel is "Ashkenazi" and "Sephardi". The Ashkenazi Jews are generally those of the European descent, whilst the Sephardi are the Jews who came to Israel from the Mid-East and North Africa. Israel was predominantly formed by Ashkenazi and all of the early leaders in the Labour Party (the ruling party until 1977) were of that background. The Sephardi generally arrived in Israel later, after being thrown out of the Muslim states in response to the founding of Israel. Sephardi have seen themselves as second class citizens ever since and remain on average poorer and less educated. The town of Sderot, infamous for being the target of Qassam rocket attacks from the Gaza strip, is a particularly working-class, Sephardi town. Many there say that if it was a rich, white suburb of Jerusalem or Tel Aviv getting rocketed daily, there is no way the government would put up with it. The mayor of Gush Etzion, the settlement we visited in the West Bank not far from Jerusalem, held very similar views saying that the security issues they faced were mishandled by the government because they don’t care about the poor and the rural. The other major ethnic distinction to economic marginalisation is the “Soviet” Jews who emigrated mainly after 1990, and now make up a sixth of the population. Integration has not been wholly successful - as the recent arrest of a “Nazi” gang, made up of Russian-Israeli youths, suggests.

The religious division in the economy affects firstly the Israeli Arabs who face many problems in the technology industries because they can’t get security clearances. This is partly said to be straight prejudice from some parts of the Jewish majority, and partly to do with many of them using the Arab exemption from military service. Secondly, the orthodox and ultra-orthodox Jews do not take part in the standard state education system, and are also exempt from IDF service. The focus of their religious schools is on the Torah, with English, maths and sciences taking a back seat. This badly prepares orthodox children for taking part in the modern economy leading to economic marginalisation. Oddly, the argument has parallels to that over the Madrassas in Pakistan. At the same time the Orthodox Jews have large families, so this sector of society is becoming demographically more significant.

The political system is currently partially paralyzed, with increasingly unwieldy coalitions having to be formed as proportional representation produces an ever more diverse and fractured polity. The three biggest parties in the Knesset: Labour, Likud and Kadema still do not command a majority even if all vote together. So whilst the marginalized groups fail economically, they remain very influential politically as governments need them in coalitions. This makes the direction of Israeli politics very hard to predict. It also mean that the people of the Israel no longer wholly share its founding premises and experiences. For example the Holocaust was central to the creation of the Jewish state, but this was to a great extent an Ashkenazi experience. The Jews of Yemen or of Iran were little affected by it, yet they now are part of the state that came out of that tragedy. The rise of Likud in the late 1970s was directly related to the support of the Sephardi community, after the post-Independence hegemony of the Labour and the Ashkenazi community, and brought with it a different world-view.

Whilst these important questions of identity and political structure remain unresolved it is not clear what will happen next in the Middle East Peace Process. We were told that last year’s war was fought by Olmert with one eye on Lebanon and the other on the stock exchange - waiting for global markets to tell him when he had to stop because Israel could not handle a collapse in confidence in the economy. The Israelis have long said that they don’t have a partner to talk to with the Palestinians, but to me it isn’t completely apparent who the Israeli partner is either. Until there is a more stable governing-coalition that isn't forced into adopting lowest common denominator policies to pacify such disparate parties within it, the future is far from clear. The next prime minister is likely to be Netanyahu or Barak, both of whom are not likely to have radical new thinking from their first attempts at power in the 1990s. And beyond the peace process, no one really seemed to know what to do about Hezbollah, let alone Iran.

Career choices for a new century

According to the Economist's review of the Mark Penn and E. Kinney Zalesne new book Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow's Big Changes rather bizarrely:

1% of young Californians say they expect to become “snipers”.

I haven't done the maths but I know that the Californian population is about the same as the UK - 60 million - and it is relatively young. Penn argues that 1% of population is a enough to make a significant trend.

From our department of corrections: A kind commenter notes I was hopelessly out on California's population - it's actually about 37 million and a big bit. So about the population of Poland then? I should google that shouldn't I? Otherwise I'm going to get some Polish commenter telling me I'm miles out again...

Oh I'm so good! You definitely want me to be on your pub quiz team. According to Wikipedia, the Polish population is 38.5 million, although from recent trips to the UK I reckon half of them are now working in British shops, hotels and other parts of the service sector - and definitely all the attractive young Polish women now seem to be in the UK (which can only be a great thing for British single blokes). I'm afraid I have no idea how many attractive polish women want to be snipers though.