by Richard Gowan | Jul 20, 2009 | Conflict and security, East Asia and Pacific, Off topic
Who do you think wrote this poem?
“My Ideal World.” It begins: “If I had my ideal world I would not allow weapons and atom bombs anymore. I would destroy all terrorists with the Hollywood star Jean-Claude Van Damme. I would make people stop taking drugs…” He wrote a somewhat chilling short story called “My Father Was a Ghost,” in which his father haunts him by pretending to be a spirit.
Can’t guess? It’s Kim Jong Chol, second son of probably-dying North Korean despot Kim Jong Il, or so says well-known Asian politics site Gawker. Sadly, he’s not the son likely to take control in Pyongyang. One can only imagine the joyous international reaction to a covert Belgo-Korean mission to take down Bin Laden…
by David Steven | Jul 19, 2009 | UK
India Knight, writing in the Sunday Times, wishes a state-employed magician could come along and make her feel better about swine flu. As that’s not possible, she’s putting her faith in larceny and homeopathy.
We’re not supposed to take our swiney selves or our swiney children into doctors’ surgeries, and doctors are far too busy for house calls, so, as far as I can see, we’re all in the dark. Also, I don’t like the sound of Tamiflu, with its side effects and lack of long-term trials. But then I don’t like the sound of death, either.
No wonder every parent I spoke to last week was in a state of controlled panic — except for the ones who’ve had swine flu, who were all cheerful and said, “Pah, it’s not so bad; you just go to bed for a few days” — although they all said there was absolutely zero support or advice available to them other than: “Don’t go to work.”
This — “it’s not so bad” — had been my take on it until healthy people started dying. Now I’m hovering between, “Yes, but healthy people still die of normal flu — not many, but some, just as some women still die in childbirth and nobody gets pregnant and then starts running around wailing about death,” and, “Oh my God, oh my God, what are we going to do?”
So far I have failed to come up with a plan. I used my low journalistic cunning to sweet-talk two chemists into telling me where the stocks of Tamiflu for my area of London were held, so now I know where to break into if we suddenly find ourselves burning up in the middle of the night. And I’ve ordered some homeopathic remedies.
Update: In the comments, Eleanor suggests a dose of homeopathic A&E.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMGIbOGu8q0[/youtube]
by Richard Gowan | Jul 16, 2009 | Climate and resource scarcity, Economics and development, North America
Yesterday, I visited Brooklyn’s Rooftop Farms, one of the best ideas to come to fruition (literally) in recession-era New York. It’s, er, a farm on a rooftop – with a view:
I was so impressed/delighted by this that I turned to the excellent inhabitat.com, a design and architecture blog with a bit of a thing for urban farms. I liked the recent proposal for a “vertical farm” on a bridge over the Thames…
…and the “Plantagon”, a “geodesic globe farm of the future”:
Solving food scarcity was never so aesthetically pleasing!
by Alex Evans | Jul 16, 2009 | Europe and Central Asia, UK
The British media are having a field day this morning about the idea of Tony Blair as President of the European Union, following remarks yesterday by Glenys Kinnock, the Minister for Europe, who said that “the UK government is supporting Tony Blair’s candidature for president of the council.”
But Charlemagne, the Economist’s European columnist, thinks everyone’s getting a bit ahead of themselves. While he missed the press briefing in Strasbourg at which Kinnock’s remarks were made, he’s spoken to a lot of his colleagues who were there, and the gist is that
Lady Kinnock, who is a very new minister, after years as an MEP, basically messed up. She was asked about Tony Blair as a possible candidate for the new presidential job, and bafflingly, this question took her by surprise. She meant to be enthusiastic, but went too far. So when she said that:
“The UK government is supporting Tony Blair’s candidature for president of the council”
that did not mean that there is a Blair candidacy, and the British government is working behind the scenes to lobby for him. What she meant was, if Tony Blair were to become the candidate, then logically enough the Labour government would lobby for him.
I do not think I am being spun here. I am told that senior British officials believed, to quote one source, that Lady Kinnock “fucked up” in the way she phrased this, and that makes sense to me … it is not something anyone wanted to rush into now. For one thing, frontrunners almost never get the big jobs in Europe. For another, it is hard to see why Mr Blair would want to put himself forwards for a job he was not very likely to get, interrupting his well-paid semi-retirement with a blast of global humiliation. Then there is the question of whether Britain would like a strong, high-profile figure to be the first holder of the post.
by Alex Evans | Jul 16, 2009 | North America
We will be doing this quadrennial review, which will be, we hope, a tool to provide us with both short-term and long-term blueprints for how to advance our foreign policy objectives and our values and interests. This will provide us with a comprehensive assessment for organizational reform and improvements to our policy, strategy, and planning processes.
– Hillary Clinton, announcing the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review last week
More than 230 years ago, Thomas Paine said, “We have it within our power to start the world over again.” Today, in a new and very different era, we are called upon to use that power. I believe we have the right strategy, the right priorities, the right policies, we have the right President, and we have the American people, diverse, committed, and open to the future.
– Hillary Clinton, speaking at the Council on Foreign Relations yesterday
