The Journal is basically right, though. I’ve been watching the recount, if not as closely as I’d like, and it’s been odd how Franken manages to scrape together a few more votes every step of the way. Not to say that the Republicans wouldn’t do such a thing, of course. There’s no mechanism to declare an election to be within the margin of error, so close races like this go to whoever controls the election machinery. Or the Supreme Court, as the case may be.
In addition to two Senate fights, there’s a governor who’s been arrested for selling influence (and earlier trying to sell one of the Senate seats now at stake), and another governor just withdrew from consideration for a cabinet position because of a similar corruption probe:
And of course we can all remember the laundry list of politicos who have gone down over the last couple of years, mainly for sex scandals but also for old-fashioned corruption. So are there more of these cases lately, at least at the higher level? Could increased public scrutiny or an increased propensity for dirty tricks be bringing more such stories to light? Or am I noticing them more because I’m fixated on political strife and discord these days?
If any of you know a good resource for tracking and comparing past political scandals, I’d love to know about it.
The crew of Sea Shepherd Conservation Society’s ship, the Steve Irwin, have found the Japanese whaling fleet, less than a week after leaving Hobart, Tasmania. The Yushin Maru # 2 was caught unaware today in dense fog and in heavy ice. The Sea Shepherd crew immediately launched a strike on the vessel with rotten butter bombs.
The Japanese whalers have been caught hunting whales inside the Australian Antarctic territorial waters in blatant contempt of a January 2008 Australian Federal Court Order prohibiting them from whaling in the Australian Economic Exclusion Zone.
Sea Shepherd intends to enforce this Order and other international conservation laws protecting endangered whale species in an established whale sanctuary in violation of the international moratorium on commercial whaling. We do so in accordance with the principles established by the United Nations World Charter for Nature.
And always in activist life, those with whom you have the most in common are those with whom your feuds run the deepest. Greenpeace and Sea Shepherd both: grow the fuck up, k?
“We passionately want to stop whaling, and will do so peacefully. That’s why we won’t help Sea Shepherd. Greenpeace is committed to non-violence and we’ll never, ever, change that; not for anything. If we helped Sea Shepherd to find the whaling fleet we’d be responsible for anything they did having got that information, and history shows that they’ve used violence in the past, in the most dangerous seas on Earth. For us, non-violence is a non-negotiable, precious principle. Greenpeace will continue to act to defend the whales, but will never attack or endanger the whalers,” the release adds.
I’m not a big proponent of political violence, but the fetishization of self-righteous non-violence is a luxury for those who can still hold theory above practice. Judging by the Whale Wars tv show, Sea Shepherd has taken some stupid risks, although more with their own lives than with those of the whalers. To equate risky behavior on the high seas with direct forms of violence, however, is a cop-out and a moral abdication.
Pirates also hijacked an Indonesian tugboat used by French oil company Total off the coast of Yemen and a Turkish cargo ship on Tuesday, Mwangura said.
“For African countries, especially those that are isolated, the cost of transporting imported products already represents 70 percent of the final consumer price.”
So now ships from Russia, India, the US and the EU will be joined by ships from China, and everyone’s got free reign by land or sea. These countries- we’ll pretend the EU is a country for the moment- these countries are arguably the Great Powers in the world today. They have some shared goals, but also some competing interests.
I’m racking my brain here, and I can’t come up with any modern precedent for this situation. After WWII, most conflict was locked into an alliance system we called the Cold War, and after that dictated by an unspoken western hegemony. Now neither model seems to apply. There’s a UN resolution authorizing action, but no suggestion of how five powers go about it in the same place at the same time.
This could go a lot of different ways. For good or ill, we’re seeing the first steps at building a new international order. Or rather, a new global order.
Poli sci nerds are advised to keep an eye on this one. It may be a small conflict, but it’s also the first solid indication of how the new system will shape up. The little compromises and tactical positions could have implications for a long time to come.
Also, a governor and a Wall Street baron have gone down in disgrace over the last few days, and no one seems to have much idea what to do about this whole economy thing. Ever get the feeling things are running off the rails?
Which reminds me, as an aside, that you should check out what’s been happening to our supply lines to Afghanistan:
Pakistani authorities closed the Khyber Pass route nine days ago after militants carried out their biggest attack yet on the supply line, torching around 260 vehicles on two consecutive nights in the northwestern city of Peshawar….
…Pakistan’s Government re-opened the route yesterday, hoping to restore a lifeline that accounts for about 70 per cent of all supplies to the 67,000 Nato, US and other foreign troops in Afghanistan.
But the Khyber Transport Association, which claims to represent the owners of 3,500 trucks, tankers and other vehicles, said that its members would no longer ply the route because of the recent security problems.
Somali pirates are actually going to court in Kenya. On the other hand, Somalia’s “government” apparently had room to collapse even further.
India, Japan and China are now circling the moon with their respective spacecraft – to be joined next year by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Then there’s the Google Lunar X Prize, a $30 million competition for the first privately funded team to send a robot to the moon, travel some 1,640 feet (500 meters) and transmit video, images and data back to Earth.
The United States on Wednesday circulated a draft United Nations Security Council resolution on the issue. It proposes that all nations and regional groups cooperating with Somalia’s government in the fight against piracy and armed robbery “may take all necessary measures ashore in Somalia.”
…
It proposes that for a year, nations “may take all necessary measures ashore in Somalia, including in its airspace, to interdict those who are using Somali territory to plan, facilitate or undertake acts of piracy and armed robbery at sea and to otherwise prevent those activities.”
The US isn’t volunteering any more ships, though. We may spare some resources from Iraq or Afghanistan here and there, definitely throw down some intel and a few cruise missiles, but I think we’re counting on the Europeans doing most of the dirty work. Seems like another program a Clinton State Department could get behind.
Would you eat this? Comments please. I eat meat, and I eat strange highly processed food products, so this doesn’t seem any worse. Maybe I ought to be more squeamish about it, but it’s just more sci fi to me. It’ll be hard to argue if it tastes like bacon and is made of science.
I hear that PETA has come out in favor of the development of test-tube meat. What’s up with that? I like to eat meat, and I try to be conscious about it — but I can’t tell if the prospect of test-tube meat should make me feel relieved or horrified.
Lisa
I’ve been slacking on your mayhem, so thanks to Sammaelhain for keeping me up to date on the riots in Greece:
So Ethiopia is on the offensive just weeks before it’s supposed to pull out. If they’re making a final smash, they might keep the islamists from seizing power for a little longer, but one more spasm of fighting is hardly what will solve any of the country’s problems.
I mentioned yesterday that the international system doesn’t seem to have the tools to handle this sort of problem these days. Here’s what the FT says Obama’s crowd is talking about. The title is hyperbole, but it’s also an indication that the subject is on people’s minds:
A taste of the ideas doing the rounds in Obama circles is offered by a recent report from the Managing Global Insecurity project, whose small US advisory group includes John Podesta, the man heading Mr Obama’s transition team and Strobe Talbott, the president of the Brookings Institution, from which Ms Rice has just emerged.
The MGI report argues for the creation of a UN high commissioner for counter-terrorist activity, a legally binding climate-change agreement negotiated under the auspices of the UN and the creation of a 50,000-strong UN peacekeeping force. Once countries had pledged troops to this reserve army, the UN would have first call upon them.
Based on chemical signatures in a piece of calcite from a cave near Jerusalem, a team of American and Israeli geologists pieced together a detailed record of the area’s climate from roughly 200 B.C. to 1100 A.D. Their analysis, to be reported in an upcoming issue of the journal Quaternary Research, reveals increasingly dry weather from 100 A.D. to 700 A.D. that coincided with the fall of both Roman and Byzantine rule in the region.
There are lots of people looking at the role of climate in history these days, and it’s generally a good idea. But this one misses the mark. You could just as easily say that the period of dry climate coincided with the rise of Byzantium as the fall. A much more interesting climatic event that relates to the collapse of Rome in the east is the year without summer, around 535.
The question is: What if anything can outside powers do to bring the rule of law to these troubled lands? In the 19th century, the answer was simple: European imperialists would plant their flag and impose their laws at gunpoint.
Like plenty of neocons, you don’t have to agree with Max Boot’s conclusions to agree that he’s asking some pretty interesting questions. The current international system doesn’t provide a lot of options that were available to the Concert of Europe, and Boot’s examples of Bosnia and Kosovo are hardly reassuring symbols of stability.
I don’t know why I follow this story so closely. It’s kind of morbid:
Blue Origin is developing New Shepard, a rocket-propelled vehicle that takes off and lands vertically and is designed to routinely fly multiple astronauts into suborbital space at competitive prices.
Flight tests of the suborbital craft have been staged at a private launch site in Texas.
Blue Origin is now noting that, in addition to providing the public with opportunities to experience spaceflight, New Shepard will also provide frequent opportunities for researchers to fly experiments into space and a microgravity environment.
A huge giant squid was caught by a remote-controlled underwater camera to 1650 feet deep in the Gulf of Mexico. En el video podemos observar como el calamar ataca la cámara y como el brazo hidráulico intenta apartarlo. In the video we can see how the squid attacking the camera and a hydraulic arm tries to remove him.
And finally, it takes the Wall Street Journal to recognize the radical implications of rebuilding our energy grid, and to ask the question that never occurs to the centrist greens:
The big-solar push raises an intriguing question: If the country is going to overhaul the way it generates power, why shouldn’t it also overhaul the way that power is distributed?
Before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, dedicating 20,000 troops to domestic response — a nearly sevenfold increase in five years — “would have been extraordinary to the point of unbelievable,” Paul McHale, assistant defense secretary for homeland defense, said in remarks last month at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. But the realization that civilian authorities may be overwhelmed in a catastrophe prompted “a fundamental change in military culture,” he said.
I posted an earlier development of this a couple of months ago. I warned people then not to be stupid- this didn’t mean martial law. The reason for that warning was that the paranoid left was going through one of its occasional panics about martial law, canceled elections, etc. that never seem to pan out. I think these panics are a symptom of ignorance, and more effort needs to be made to educate people on the practical matters of politics.
But this shouldn’t obscure the fact that we have a creeping authoritarianism in this country that has its roots before 9/11, and is unlikely to get turned around if we don’t take action against it. I’m wary of terms like fascism, martial law and police state, because they have specific meanings that don’t necessarily apply the way people use them, but I’m afraid that by shunning the terms, I lose the ability to talk about what’s happening in a way people understand. I suppose we need new ways to talk about these things that reflect today’s world, much like most of the rest of our political vocabulary.
Several of these stories indicate pirates attacking in greater numbers than before, or going after new types of targets. I’d suggest this is a tactical response to the increased presence of foreign navies in the region. It may mean the pirates will be able to respond to changing conditions and will not be suppressed as easily as some people expect.
The rare white lemuroid possum hasn’t been sighted for the past three years. Scientists are concerned it might have the ignominious distinction of being the world’s first mammal sent to extinction by global warming.
This contract is good news, in a sense. It means we’ll be using the Soyuz to send astronauts to the International Space Station, and I certainly wouldn’t argue that we stop going up there. But what’s up with having to rely on the Russians? Once the shuttle is retired, we’ll have no capability to put humans in space. Not until the new system is up and running, and who knows how NASA will fare over the next few years?
