Blogoir: October

Good question:

Why do Asian investors depend on American capital markets? Given the near breakdown of key sectors of the American market, one might expect Asians to bring their money home. Quite the opposite has happened: Asian currencies have fallen sharply against the American dollar...

What does America have that Asia doesn't have? The answer is, Sarah Palin - not Sarah Palin the vice presidential candidate, but Sarah Palin the "hockey mom" turned small-town mayor and reforming Alaska governor. All the PhDs and MBAs in the world can't make a capital market work, but ordinary people like Sarah Palin can. Laws depend on the will of the people to enforce them. It is the initiative of ordinary people that makes America's political system the world's most reliable...

On the other hand:

"Hockey Moms," to be sure, may not be the optimal promoters of America's future. One for one, the "Piano Moms" of China are cleverer people and produce smarter offspring.

China's 30 million students of classical piano are one of the two great popular movements in the world today: the other is the House Church movement in Chinese Christianity. Children who play hockey will grow up to get coffee for children who study piano.

As a pool of talent, nothing compares with the educated segment of the East Asian population that has embraced and mastered Western culture. Nonetheless, Asia still can't invest its own money at home, and seems farther than ever from that objective.

Why?

Because of endemic corruption and (therefore) unhealthy attitudes to government and personal responsibility:

The trouble is that rich Asians don't lend to poor Asians in their own countries. Capital markets don't work in the developing world because it is too easy to steal money.

Subprime mortgages in the US have suffered from poor documentation. What kind of documentation does one encounter in countries where everyone from the clerk at the records office to the secretary who hands you a form requires a small bribe? America is litigious to a fault, but its courts are fair and hard to corrupt.

Asians are reluctant to lend money to each other under the circumstances; they would rather lend money in places where a hockey mom can get involved in local politics and, on encountering graft and corruption, run a successful campaign to turn the scoundrels out.

You do not need PhDs and MBAs for that. You need ordinary people who care sufficiently about the places in which they live to take control of their own towns and states when required. And, yes, it doesn't hurt if they own guns. Popular gun ownership places a limit on the abuse of state power.

And, of course, the deeper drama amidst the current turmoil is that our governments are binge-spending money they can't squeeze from us (so they grab it from future generations), in full knowledge that the demographic base to sustain such spending is declining as fewer people in work have to support more and more elderly people (ie me, and probably you).

Decline? Meet Fall.

Many people do.

It took a while, but I have finally caught up with Rickrolling.

Nick Lowe had the last word to say on this subject, as on most others: 

I have been rambling on for some time about how Government is failing in good part because it can not cope with Complexity.

Thus the preoccupation with Objectives/Targets/Strategies and the rest is, I unhumbly suggest, theoretically meaningless, ergo operationally harmful.

In the light of the utter mess now unfolding within private and public sectors alike, this passage from April reads pretty damn well:

... governments (and the public) have no way of deciding how to manage risk, in the sense of reasonably calculating the likelihood of policies (a) being properly implemented and (b) producing the good results we expect, over (c) a realistic timescale, while (d) keeping an eye on the opportunity cost of not doing something else.

Thus no-one can tell us which is better:

• short-term likely-to-work quick wins
• medium-term, maybe-less-likely-to-work significant wins
• longer-term, medium risk, potentially huge wins

Government thrashing around in this conceptual morass is now horrible to behold.

Not surprisingly the public get fed up and confused. Populist noises and a Sense of Looming Unease grow in parallel.

Remember that Y2K issue - the fear that somewhere lost in all those computer programmes was an inability to get the date right when the previous century ended?

That turned out OK. But now we have a similar sort of problem, the ramifications of finding ourselves trapped in computerised banking and other systems of dynamic cause and effect which are so subtle and complex we mortals can no longer keep up.

Tim Congdon lucidly explained the essence of the situation here, namely that as wealth scales up it can also scale down:

Unfortunately, last year the wholesale money markets closed up for a wide variety of reasons, of which the most important was the fall in American house prices and the implications of that fall for the value of the structured finance securities.

Triple-A securities dropped in value, often by 10 to 20 per cent. If such securities were, say, 10 per cent of high street bank assets then they had lost 1 or 2 per cent of the value of all their assets.

That sounds trifling, hardly enough to threaten the banks' charitable donations let alone the future of capitalism. But here comes the vicious arithmetic.

A drop in the value of assets of 2 per cent wipes out 40 per cent of the capital of an organisation such as a bank that is only 5 per cent owned by its shareholders.

According to rules developed by international financial bureaucrats in Basle over the past 20 years, a bank that has lost a big chunk of its capital must - at least theoretically - shrink its assets to restore the sacred capital-to-assets ratio to its original level.

A ghastly downward spiral, called “debt deflation”, can now engulf the system. The banks can shrink their assets by selling off securities or forcing their customers to repay loans. But sales of securities aggravate the fall in their price, and forcing customers to repay loans is even more gruesome.

As loan portfolios decline, so does the level of bank deposits. Bank deposits are the principal form of money in today's world. If the quantity of money goes down, so do asset prices, incomes and spending.

Meanwhile EU Referendum are doing a stunning job in drilling down into the European-level regulatory framework which is impacting the UK's capacity to act independently now, even though the UK is not in the Eurozone. They draw our attention to the deep madness of Euro-complexity:

This is what is has all come down to:

The text of Article 1(1) of Directive 86/635/EEC shall be replaced by the following text:

'1. Articles 2, 3, 4(1), (3) to (5), Articles 6, 7, 13, 14, 15(3) and (4), Articles 16 to 21, 29 to 35, 37 to 41, 42 first sentence, 42a to 42d, 45(1), 46(1) and (2), Articles 48 to 50, 50a, 51(1), 56 to 59, 61 and 61a of Directive 78/660/EEC shall apply to the institutions mentioned in Article 2 of this Directive, except where this Directive provides otherwise. However, Articles 35(3), 36, 37 and 39(1) to (4) of this Directive shall not apply with respect to assets and liabilities that are valued in accordance with Section 7a of Directive 78/660/EEC.'

You will be pleased to learn that this comes from Directive 2001/65/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 27 September 2001 amending Directives 78/660/EEC, 83/349/EEC and 86/635/EEC as regards the valuation rules for the annual and consolidated accounts of certain types of companies as well as of banks and other financial institutions.

This sort of thing can continue only because we the Western citizenry of the planet blink and turn away in shame at the horror of what modern government has become, and therefore at what we have become as well.

And as the State moves in to 'nationalise' some key banks, it will only get worse. And worse.

Instead, what we need is a robust, easy-to-follow new plan which will last for, say, six or seven centuries and be almost fraud-proof.

And we do not even have to invent one.

That was done for us some eight hundred years ago.

Feuding as he already is with his lead FCO department, Craig Murray sits down to write a strong speech on Uzbekistan human rights issues.

He sends a draft to London, to FCO Human Rights Department led by his old pal (and mine) Jon Benjamin - himself something of a post-Sovietologist as he worked with me on the collapse of the Soviet Union back in 1991/92.

Craig's book does not say how much notice he gave London to look at the text. It causes a stir.

The day before the speech is due to be delivered, Eastern Department consult Sir Michael Jay, the FCO top official, saying that "we are fast developing a problem with Craig Murray" in part over his lax attitude to communications security; the speech is bound to make the Uzbeks very angry.

Sir M Jay replies. The text of his sensible views as they appear on Craig's website does not (not) show that Michael Jay was 'horrified' (as Craig absurdly asserts) that Craig was due to speak on human rights in Taskent.

A rapid negotiation ensues over the text. One of the reasonable London comments is available via Craig's site, even though his site says that it isn't(!).

Craig replies in strong terms, bemoaning (Cliche Alert) the classic public school and Oxbridge-influenced FCO house style as 'ponderous, self-important and ineffective'.

A text approved by London (with which Craig himself is delighted) appears just in time. The speech is duly delivered to a crowd attending the opening of a new American NGO office.

The speech has some immediate dramatic effect, as it goes to contradict or at least heavily qualify what the US Ambassador has just said, as it (according to Craig) challenged the whole carefully constructed US illusion about Uzbekistan. It is picked up by the international media.

Here is the text of the speech. It's not what I would have done - we all have our own styles - but it is sharp without being hysterical (and so in fact a good example of Post and London working together).

The next day at a banquet for the visiting UN Sec-Gen, the President of Uzbekistan ostentatiously shakes Craig's hand:

I could only surmise he was demonstrating publicly, or specifically to Kofi Annan, that he could take criticism.

Various other interpretations suggest themselves, of course.

Professional Judgement Rating: 5/10.  Good that Craig's energy and principles propelled him to make a substantial human rights speech early in his tour, probably pushing London in form and substance further than they might otherwise have gone. But this success is achieved at the expense of his new relationship with the US Ambassador and by bruising colleagues in London.

Has he thought through how best to make progress steadily over a three-year posting? Or is all this little more than manic improvisation?

A neat summing up of attitudes round the region as Macedonia and Montenegro recognise Kosovo.

Key argument:

It also helps that Montenegro supported a Serbian initiative in the UN seeking a ruling by the International Court of Justice on Kosovo's February independence declaration. The General Assembly adopted that resolution on October 8, in a move that Belgrade heralded as a great diplomatic victory. Macedonia abstained. All of these moves by Montenegro and Macedonia should help restrain Serbia's reaction.

Another positive sign -- one coming from Serbia itself -- is even more important. It would appear that Belgrade has made a decision to limit its challenges to Kosovar independence to legal, political, and diplomatic means.

That Serbia -- with its long history to the contrary -- has given up violence as its main tool of international relations is important to note. Some might cynically argue that Serbia is worn out by all the conflicts it has lost over the last 20 years. But the real reason is that today's Serbia is much different from the Serbia of just six months ago and, of course, incomparable to the Serbia of Slobodan Milosevic's day.

Plus this:

It is also important to note that Russia's military intervention in Georgia and its hasty recognition of the breakaway Georgia regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia have dramatically weakened Serbia's hand regarding Kosovo. Three countries -- Portugal is the third -- have recognized Kosovo in the last week and more will follow soon.

Why has the Russia/Georgia intervention weakened Serbia's hand? Not made clear.

Maybe the point is that before that intervention Russia could make a credible claim to upholding a core international law principle, whereas after the intervention the Russian position looked utterly self-serving if not malicious?

Hence others who found it comfortable to hide behind Principle now see that cover shrinking, so prefer to tip-toe for safety behind Realism?

Forlorn hope at the end:

Now the only former Yugoslav countries that have not recognized Kosovo are Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, and it will be some time yet before Sarajevo takes this step.

But Kosovo is now firmly a reality in the Balkans, and reality always prevails sooner or later. Maybe Bosnia and Serbia will be the next pair of Balkan countries to recognize Kosovo. Or would that just be too much good news for a region like the Balkans.

Nothing will happen on this front until the ICJ issues its advisory opinion. And, depending on what that opinion opines, maybe not for a long time thereafter.

Chapter 7 of Craig Murray's book describes his first serious skirmish with the FCO, over a speech he makes about human rights.

By the date of the speech he has been in Uzbekistan exactly 56 days. His nonetheless bold aim:

... to fracture what I believed had become a conspiracy of silence by the West on human rights in Uzbekistan and to outline a distinctive British position in favour of democracy and reform which made it plain that we did not simply follow the United States.

Hmm.

What 'conspiracy', and what silence? A distinctive British position? Or a distinctive Murray position? Not necessarily the same thing?

Already he is falling out with his 'lead' department in the FCO, Eastern Department. His description of them is ... let me choose my words carefully ... utterly ridiculous:

... stilted working practices of a previous century ... obsessed with the need to prevent the Uzbeks from knowing what we were thinking ... old Sovietologists remained steeped in the paranoid culture of the Cold War...

Why is this utterly ridiculous?

Three reasons.

First, the Department would not have been full of 'old Sovietologists'. Indeed if anything there are not enough of them around these days, hence our recent misjudgements over Putin/Kosovo/Georgia.

Second, as Craig himself puts it (p 37) the Uzbek regime left the USSR to keep the Soviet system, not to destroy it. So maybe some residual Cold War instincts back in London were going to come in handy?

Third, as Craig will have known the department had access to far more information than he had about Uzbek and ex-KGB type attempts to attack his Embassy's security. If he wanted to be taken seriously in London, he in turn had to respect their views in this area, even if it made life awkward at times.

Craig breezily tries to gloss over this point, telling them that:

I knew my emails were almost certainly being intercepted [by the Uzbeks] ... that was all to the good: it would save me the effort of telling them.

No.

Useful now and again, of course. I used the same technique in Sarajevo. But in principle a professionally trite and personally self-defeating approach, the more so if disagreements start to appear over Policy, when the Uzbeks will quickly grasp that Craig does not enjoy London's full authority.

Craig's plummet from FCO grace has quite a lot to do with communications problems of all sorts.

Basically (as I understand it), he did not have a Confidential email system. He did have an Unclassified FCO email system (which in Tashkent's circumstances could not have been regarded as secure) plus a separate more cumbersome system for sending Confidential and even higher rated Telegrams.

This was a real disadvantage to Craig (as it was to many other Embassies at that point, ie while the new CONF systems were being installled one by one round the globe). By then the FCO Main Building/Whitehall was operating primarily on CONF email, so he was 'out of the loop' for many normal purposes.

It all comes down to cost, of course. Installing a CONF email system in a tough place like Uzbekistan and then keeping it secure meant heavy new security measures and (probably) building works by UK contractors.

A pity that the book does not make all this clear - and tell us what (if anything) both sides did to address these real communication issues sensibly.

Professional Judgement Rating: 2/10.  Fatuous attitude right from the start of his posting evinced towards key colleagues in London, whom he needed to get on-side if he wanted to achieve anything during his tour. (NB Diplomacy starts with one's own colleagues). Plus flippant approach to security, potentially a serious problem. Commendable intention to stake out a firm public UK position on human rights - but needs to be careful not to get out on a limb in policy terms.

Next: that Craig Murray speech.

Remember the Mark Steyn trials testing the limits of Free Speech in democratic Canada?

He has been acquitted.

Which he thinks is a cowardly decision by the Tribunal concerned:

Because we spent a ton of money and had a bigshot Queen's Counsel and exposed the joke jurisprudence and (at the federal "human rights" commission) systemic corruption, the kangaroo courts decided that discretion was the better part of valor. The Ontario "Human Rights" Commission ruled they weren't able to prosecute the case because of a technicality - I offered to waive the technicality, but the wimps still bailed out.

If you have the wherewithal to stand up to these totalitarian bullies, they stampede for the exits. But, if you're just an obscure Alberta pastor or a guy with a widely unread website or a fellow who writes a letter to his local newspaper, they'll destroy your life.

So Mark is offering $1000 to help his Muslim opponents push an appeal.

A phrase which these days is hard to eradicate from bureaucratic discourse is 'positive feedback'.

It is used in the sense of asking around for views on an issue/paper/person and getting views 'fed back' (positive views, or negative views).

Quiet how this scientifically precise phrase came to acquire this trite new linguistic life of its own beats me.

I tried in vain to stamp it out in Embassies under my control. Another horror I grappled with was the non-word  'underway', which started to spread like wildfire through FCO reports ("Once the meeting was underway...")

In proper usage the expression 'positive feedback' means a process which as it were reinforces itself, sometimes to explosive effect (eg an atomic explosion):

Positive feedback, sometimes referred to as "cumulative causation", is a feedback loop system in which the system responds to perturbation in the same direction as the perturbation.

This is an interesting account of such 'accelerating returns' in biology and technology.

After a long break (exhaustion) we return to working our way through Craig Murray's Murder in Samarkand.

Chapters 5 and 6 give us a lively account of Craig's first major foray deep into Uzbekistan (the Ferghana Valley), complete with accompanying local KGB-style minders. He stays in dirty, basic hotels ("I felt that more respect should be shown to a British Ambassador") and drinks vodka with local officials. One hotel receptionist has studied in the UK under an official Uzbek scholarship programme, only to be allocated this lowly job on his return.

He also visits various factories and projects, including a major EBRD-supported wool factory which looks like a major corruption exercise (Note: unclear what if anything Craig subsequently did to raise his concerns on this score with Whitehall/EBRD).

He meets a human rights activist who tells him that there are nearly 400 Muslim dissidents/activists imprisoned from Ferghana city, many from HuT (Hizb-ut-Tehrir), an organisation wanting to establish a single Caliphate over all Muslim lands. As Craig describes them, HuT are "against violence but also against democracy and participation in politics", and (he argues) a growing force in Uzbekistan because the regime is so repressive and offers few genuine ways of letting different voices be heard. He offers to buy the activist a taxpayer-funded PC, apparently on the strength of this one first meeting.

My theory of diplomacy is that every hour a diplomat spends in an Embassy is time wasted. You are paid by the taxpayer to live in a foreign country, so get out there and see it, returning to the Embassy only to get your reports out.

So Craig does well here to make such an effort to have a good open-minded look round early in his posting, including by showing that he is ready to talk openly with people whom the regime must dislike.

Professional Judgement Rating: 8/10. Commendably thorough early 'hands-on' tour to regions rarely visited by Western officials. Good range of people and factories/enterprises included. Need to keep an eye on the late-night socialising (creates a strange impression if overdone) and on cross-checking the credentials of new possibilities for small-scale Embassy support. Risks of local human rights activists being persecuted for meeting him after Craig has left the area?

Michael Totten has written a good piece about the Nagorno-Karabakh problem, albeit as seen from the Azerbaijan side of things.

We tend to think that the Soviet Union broke up 'peacefully' (just as we inaccurately think that South Africa's transition from apartheid was 'peaceful'). This is because the vastness of the drama of Russia struggling to adopt democracy left smaller but serious problems in the diplomatic shade.

But one especially nasty conflict took place between Armenia and Azerbaijan over a disputed mountainous region called 'Higher Karabakh', which Armenia claimed it had to defend as the Azeris were bent on focing its Armenian population out. Heavy casualties and hundreds of thousands of people were displaced.

To cut a long and dismal story short, Armenia now has de facto control of NK plus large tracts of Azeri territory to the south and west. Yet the 'island' of Azerbaijan territory between Armenia and Iran (Nakhichevan Autonomous Region) is still there.

Back in 1992/93 there was a willingness on the part of senior Western circles to make a personal effort to move the NK problem towards some sort of negotiated peace. I joined FCO Minister Douglas Hogg on a visit to both Baku and Yerevan. We flew back to London agreeing that there was scope for progress, but knowing in our dark hearts that HM Government would not invest any serious resources in achieving one.

Thus an unhappy stalemate drags on, with a group of countries (the Minsk Group) led by the USA, Russia and France trying to broker a reasonable outcome of some sort.

The problem is that this dispute is partly about NK itself, but also about many other issues.

Oil: Azerbaijan has lots.  

Armenia's existential insecurity: stemming from the 'genocide' (or not) back in 1915 of huge numbers of Armenians at the hands of Turks.

Iran: far more Azeris live in Iran than in Azerbaijan. So the NK conflict could lead to greater upheavals if it ran out of control.

Maybe some sort of existential reconciliation between Turkey and Armenia can help? Things are moving here, at least, with the Turkish President recently visiting Armenia in a visit that deserves to be called historic.

What does Russia want?

Back in the mid-1990s I went to see the then Russian special NK negotiator formally charged with trying to help cut a deal between the two sides. He opened a glass-fronted cabinet and took out exhibits from what he called his Museum of Diplomatic Curiosities, documents featuring negotiations between Baku and Yerevan which had broken down over the placing of commas and words like 'the'. He shrugged, seemingly content to let these two puny states carry on getting nowhere.  

Would Russia somehow prompt trouble if it looked as if there really was a prospect of a negotiated outcome between Armenia and Azerbaijan over NK, and more widely? Not difficult to do.

I suspect that whatever the formal policy might be, under current management Russia's basic instinct is to punish these two former Soviet republics for breaking away from Mother Russia, which means letting them twist sadly in the wind until Russia decides what should happen - and decides to bring it about, on Russia's terms. 

Serbia's ingenious ploy to play for time on the Kosovo question - and to muddy the waters of those countries contemplating recognising Kosovo's independence - has paid off handsomely.

Serbia today won the vote in the UN General Assembly to refer the issue to the International Court of Justice for an advisory opinion.

A handy if somewhat ambiguous win: 77 votes for Serbia, 6 against and a large number of abstentions.

Feeble EU disunity was again to the fore, with the UK and France abstaining (no doubt for fear of looking silly in a tiny group against) and Slovakia, Greece, Cyprus, Spain and Romania all voting with Belgrade.

Now what?

Nothing much.

The ICJ will start its ruminations. Those countries opposed to Kosovo's independence will feel justified in pressing the UN not to cede its role on the ground to Kosovo to EULEX.

Serbia can get on with making its case for eventual EU accession.

Kosovo Albanians will wait uneasily for the ICJ vote, knowing that it will have no binding effect but wondering what will happen if the ICJ holds that the Kosovo independence process was in some way flawed.

Russia can gloat that it again has done a better job of mobilising global support than the US/UK/France.

And the region's cigarette and other smugglers among all ethnic communities will be delighted. The greyer the status of Kosovo, the greater their chances of piling up the loot.

When in doubt, follow the money. 

If you had a camera that took pictures at a stunning 250,000 frames per second, what's the first thing you'd film in ultra slow-motion?

Yes, that's right!

Fungus plants on dung-heaps, shooting out spores.

The 'fastest thing in nature'.

Now, at last, filmed. And set to opera.

Here, if you can face it, are some of the Weathermen, not so young now but yet burbling on about their wondrous contribution to world affairs.

Polly Toynbee's volume rises in direct proportion to the slide in share prices.

Her latest rather freewheeling thoughts open thusly:

A remarkable 10,000 people marched on Trafalgar Square at the weekend to hold the government to its promise to end child poverty.

This somehow reminded me of my visit back in 1987 or so to Red Location, one of the most awful apartheid South African 'townships' near Port Elizabeth.

Named after the rusting corrugated iron barracks there, it is now the site of a sharp new museum commemorating the anti-apartheid struggle.

When I passed through back then, the desolation and poverty were all too obvious. The sanitation was beyond description - only a handful of blocked semi-public WCs for hundreds of people.

At that time the memory of Bantu Steve Biko and the Black Consciousness Movement was still fresh, even if the BCM as such was under attack from the communistic ANC/SACP who wanted no rivals. Those townships where the BCM had a presence seemed to feature a greater emphasis on self-help and self-reliance.

I later went to visit veteran communist leader Govan Mbeki (father of the now fallen Thabo, then recently released from Robben Island) at his little house. This recalls that memorable encounter.

I described to G Mbeki my visit to Red Location - surely the ANC as the local power should be doing more to motivate the people living there to clean things up a bit and try to improve their lot.

"It's not the job of the people to do the job of the government", retorted Mbeki, tetchily.

Which of course may be true. Yet what a bleak practical philosophy that attitude brings with it: a willingness to let people rot - if not to encourage them to rot to pep up their sporadic militancy - until the state fixes things.

Toynbeeism (as befits the Guardian with its Broad Left anti-libertarian outlook) is all about collectivist compulsion. How inspiring that supposedly poor people march to demand that not so poor people give them more money! And not by choice, but by force of the weight of the state.

The then Ambassador at my first posting in Belgrade was Sir Edwin Bolland. As we trundled round former Yugoslavia on long car journeys he would talk of his upbringing in a mining community in northern England in the 1930s, a brutish poor existence. Amidst the deprivation the working-class families invested heavily in self-help and education, setting up hard-working study groups with a view to improving their lot and giving their children a better chance.

If as seems likely we all need to take a 'back to basics' new look at what works and what does not in sustaining modern society, maybe that should include a hard look at the role of the state in dumbing down over many decades those principles of self-reliance and self-motivation, in favour of ignorant demands that 'the government' take more and more decisions for us?

As world financial markets reel, which article tops the list of Indy website Most Read pieces?

Not surprisingly the one with this headline:

Ex-Mr Gay UK 'cooked and ate sex partner'

As a metaphor for dogger-eats-dogger rampant capitalism, that story's hard to beat?

True enough.

But maybe we might have expected rather more of the Economist?

Is the problem that standards are slipping even at this level of supposedly good journalism?

Or that people claiming to be serious are no longer aware of what standards actually are?

Is one answer to gloabal energy problems for us humans to do what electric eels do to generate electricty?

But better?

Articles assessing the dire state of public health in Russia keep appearing.

Here is another. Some numbers:

... remember tuberculosis? In the United States, with a population of 303 million, 650 people died of the disease in 2007.

In Russia, which has a total of 142 million people, an astonishing 24,000 of them died of tuberculosis in 2007. Can it possibly be coincidental that, according to Gennady Onishchenko, the country's chief public health physician, only 9 percent of Russian TB hospitals meet current hygienic standards, 21 percent lack either hot or cold running water, 11 percent lack a sewer system, and 20 percent have a shortage of TB drugs?

Or this:

Peter Piot, the head of UNAIDS, the U.N. agency created in response to the epidemic, told a press conference this summer that he is "very pessimistic about what is going on in Russia and Eastern Europe . . . where there is the least progress."

This should be all the more worrisome because young people are most at risk in Russia. In the United States and Western Europe, 70 percent of those with HIV/AIDS are men over age 30; in Russia, 80 percent of this group are aged 15 to 29.

The problem with these mega-trends is that once the negative demographic momentum caused by them builds up, it is almost impossible to change it for the better. Fact: fewer babies now mean fewer women to have children 25 years later:

Russia's birth rate has been declining for more than a decade, and even a recent increase in births will be limited by the fact that the number of women age 20 to 29 (those responsible for two-thirds of all babies) will drop markedly in the next four or five years to mirror the 50 percent drop in the birth rate in the late 1980s and the 1990s.

So what? Russia can duff up Georgia any time it wants. Post-Soviet Russian Pride, and all that.

The Weathermen issue (and Barack Obama's links to Bill Ayers) have made it to the front page of the BBC website:

Sarah Palin has accused presidential candidate Barack Obama of "palling around" with terrorists - referring to his acquaintance with a former member of the Weather Underground. So who were the Weather Underground?

The BBC describes how these audacious, idealistic, counter-culture, 'left-wing extremists' did some bad stuff.

But the question rather (and almost completely unanswered by the BBC, of course), is "why is Sarah Palin saying that Barack Obama has been 'palling around' with these people?"

The best answer we get is this:

During the late 1990s, Mr Obama served on the same charity board as Mr Ayers.

Such was the threat engendered by the group that a tenuous association with a former member can still cause ripples in a presidential race three decades later.

Er, no.

The point rather is that Obama has lent different sorts of support to someone linked to smug, nihilistic, leftist/Marxist indoctrination throughout his life.

A someone whose New York Times article saying "I don't regret setting bombs, I feel we didn't do enough" appeared, as fate would have it, on 9 September 2001.

Creepy.

Too creepy for me.

Update: NIcely turned thought from Volokh Conspiracy