Hard News: The Wellington Cables
406 Responses
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Incredibly in my research (and yes, I'm an Eng-Lit major) it is possible to get funding from the US Defence Department, they're quite happy to listen. And even if I couldn't see the military applications, maybe they could.
The primary "military" objective of the Pentagon is to get more and more money out of Washington. English Lit is more militarily useful than Aerospatial Engineering.
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Tim Hannah, in reply to
Fair enough, thank you for looking it up so I could sit on my arse.
Though I still have a not quite convinced feeling – OECD definition seems to imply ODA is on a cash basis, but I think it’d include the cost of food aid under welfare. US law at least until a couple of years ago* required that 3/4s of food aid be grown and packaged in the States and shipped by US flagged vessels. I don’t believe that the US would agree to a definition of aid that understated the spend it could claim by 75%. But I’m reasonably cynical about these things.
Anyway, not a big issue in this context, enough to say that neither nation is overwhelming in its generosity.
*Meant to say, I'm assuming this article is accurate - sounds reasonable, but I don't know much about this stuff.
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I think I'm not just making it up.
You're reassuring me that this does actually go back in the main to something I/S wrote. It's neither how Hager presented it nor the media spun it, nor the terms in which it was discussed here. One could be excused from the way you were presenting it to think that it was the way a substantial number of people, if not one whole side of the debate, looked at the information.
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Paul Williams, in reply to
See what Scotch does?
Here, I've poured you another one :)
Indeed. I only wish I was similarly so perspicacious after a dram!
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I suggest you do it based on facts.
Holbrooke was instrumental in stopping Milosevic, that's a fact.
Any reference for Holbrooke being part of the Phoenix Program?
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Russell Brown, in reply to
One could be excused from the way you were presenting it to think that it was the way a substantial number of people, if not one whole side of the debate, looked at the information.
Oh, fine. It was my impression that people were thinking that way, I thought it was unfair to the journalists concerned, and I said so. It does seem to have been a sufficiently substantial issue to generate plenty of discussion.
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giovanni tiso, in reply to
Any reference for Holbrooke being part of the Phoenix Program?
It came up a lot in the last couple of days, but no reference at hand. Wikipedia suggests that he was enlisted to work under Komer (who was the brain of the PP) in a committee that operated separately from the National Security Committee.
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Che Tibby, in reply to
You know, the only person I have seen using the word "scandalous" with the International Visitor programme is you Russell.
i have a vague suspicion Rb would like to be taken on that trip.
look out for seed pods man...
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Joe Wylie, in reply to
Holbrooke was instrumental in stopping Milosevic, that’s a fact.
Talk about breaking as many eggs as possible in order to make a pathetically tiny omelette.
The “accidental” bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade was just the excuse that the anti-reform elements in the Chinese Communist Party and PLA needed. -
Sacha, in reply to
who ever thought "bells + gunpowder = cannon"?
I like that
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giovanni tiso, in reply to
It was my impression that people were thinking that way, I thought it was unfair to the journalists concerned, and I said so.
It was a useful point to make, and I've appreciated the backgrounder. I was just questioning how days later we were still focussing on the Fulbright programme being a good thing as if anybody outside of I/S had ever said otherwise.
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Russell Brown, in reply to
i have a vague suspicion Rb would like to be taken on that trip.
Come to think of it, I was once invited to make a Fulbright funding application after I’d done some presentation at Parliament, but I never got around to thinking of a good purpose for it.
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who ever thought “bells + gunpowder = cannon”? not the chinese.
Nice litterick.
...Like firearms, cannon are a descendant of the fire lance, a gunpowder-filled tube attached to the end of a spear and used as a flamethrower in China.[11] Shrapnel was sometimes placed in the barrel, so that it would fly out along with the flames.[12] Eventually, the paper and bamboo of which fire lance barrels were originally constructed came to be replaced by metal.[13] It has been disputed at which point flame-projecting cannon were abandoned in favor of missile-projecting ones, as words meaning either incendiary or explosive are commonly translated as gunpowder.[14] The earliest known depiction of a gun is a sculpture from a cave in Sichuan, dating to the 12th century, that portrays a figure carrying a vase-shaped bombard, firing flames and a ball.[13][15] The oldest surviving gun, dated to 1288, has a muzzle bore diameter of 2.5 cm (1 in); the second oldest, dated to 1332, has a muzzle bore diameter of 10.5 cm (4 in).[11]
The first documented battlefield use of gunpowder artillery took place on January 28, 1132, when Song General Han Shizhong used huochong to capture a city in Fujian. The world's earliest known cannon, dated 1282, was found in Mongol-held Manchuria.[16] The first known illustration of a cannon is dated to 1326.[17] In his 1341 poem, The Iron Cannon Affair, one of the first accounts of the use of gunpowder artillery in China, Xian Zhang wrote that a cannonball fired from an eruptor could "pierce the heart or belly when it strikes a man or horse, and can even transfix several persons at once."[18...
...Ahmad Y. al-Hassan claims that the Battle of Ain Jalut in 1260 saw the Mamluks use against the Mongols in "the first cannon in history" gunpowder formula which were almost identical with the ideal composition for explosive gunpowder, which he claims were not known in China or Europe until much later...
...The first confirmed use of gunpowder in Europe was the Moorish cannon, first used by the Andalusians in the Iberian Peninsula, at the siege of Seville in 1248, and the siege of Niebla in 1262.[21][34] By this time, hand guns were probably in use, as scopettieri—"gun bearers"—were mentioned in conjunction with crossbowmen, in 1281. In Iberia, the "first artillery-masters on the Peninsula" were enlisted, at around the same time
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Che Tibby, in reply to
never got around to thinking of a good purpose for it.
"to booze and rub shoulders" never looks all that good on the application.
some sort of diploma in journalism would work, as would "write a book of significance to everyone, fuck yeah twatcocks"
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dude... i'd appreciate you not undermining my incorrect factoids with, well, reality.
>:/
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Sorry, I’d been waiting for months to use the word.
litt-er-ick (Chiefly British) literick
/ˈlɪtərɪk/
-noun (c)a fallacious attribution of historical origin. The reduction of a complex set of interacting historical/ cultural phenomena to a singular simplified common genesis.
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An encouraging report about the quality of New Zealand aid spending.
NB: Kiwiblog link -- contents may contain random bitterness.
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giovanni tiso, in reply to
The reduction of a complex set of interacting historical/ cultural phenomena to a singular simplified common genesis.
I am speechless.
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A graduation gift Doctor.
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I'm an Eng-Lit major
Rather embarrasingly, it took me a couple of seconds to realise 'Eng' did not stand for 'Engineering' (well, you were talking about robots....).
I was about to ask you for some Engineering-Literature recommendations.
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Speaking of research programmes and the evils of the US reminds me: according to the intro this was a proposal by two academics when asked for reseach initiative Lockheed might fund:
Irony is a powerful and incompletely understood feature of human dynamics. A technique for dissimulation and “secret speech,” irony is considerably more complex than lying and even more dangerous...
And yet while major research resources have for forty years poured into the human sciences from the defense and intelligence community in an effort to gain control over the human capacity to lie (investments that led to the modern polygraph, sodium pentothal–derived truth serums, “brain fingerprinting,” etc.), we have no comparable tradition of sustained, empirical, applied investigation into irony.
That article would arguably be one good thing Lockheed Martin is responsible for.
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Although if you think about it it's not at all ironic that Lockheed Martin might want to shift attention away from lying.
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Simon Grigg, in reply to
Holbrooke was instrumental in stopping Milosevic, that's a fact
Actually Neil it's a part of a fact somewhat misrepresented:
Triumph and controversy will go hand in hand into the legacy of Richard Holbrooke. That includes the story of Bosnia and the Dayton peace accord, for which he is being hailed this week as a master negotiator. While the 1995 agreement ended the killing in Bosnia—a resident of Sarajevo told me this year that many still think of him as "God"—Holbrooke is also remembered for having left the small country deeply divided between Serbs and largely Muslim Bosniaks, with separate governments working (in theory at least) in a weak federal coalition.
Serbs retained the power to obstruct a healing of ethnic wounds by denying or downplaying atrocities that took place on a scale not seen in Europe since World War II. Bosnian women, targeted for rape by Serbs or widowed in the mass killings of Bosnian men, as in Srebrenica, have suffered most during the past two decades. European institutions, left to finish the job of putting Bosnia and Herzegovina back together again, have not been able to undo this decision, the price of an agreement that has left paralysis in its wake.
On East Timor, his record of enabling the Indonesian / Suharto bloodbath which took the lives of a third of that nation and has left it as the world's poorest nation is fairly well documented:
From one cable:
Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke’s visit to Jakarta in April 1977 and his lengthy meeting with President Suharto was the first by a high-ranking Carter Administration official. The visit occurred during the run-up to tightly-controlled Presidential and parliamentary elections in which hundreds of Suharto opponents had been arrested and critical newspapers shuttered. It thus represented, in the words of the U.S. Embassy, an “unusual opportunity” to advance concerns about human rights and democracy more generally - had that been Holbrooke’s intention. In his meeting with Suharto, however, the Assistant Secretary offered no criticism of Indonesia’s human rights record while “acknowledging efforts President Suharto appeared to be making to resolve Indonesian problems,” especially on East Timor, where he “applauded” the President’s judgment in allowing Congressional members to visit the territory but remained mute on reports of ongoing atrocities.
He was, thereafter, the primary enabler in the delivery to Suharto of A-4 Skyhawks and extra Ov-10 Broncos which were specifically required for East Timor.
He was also a major hawk on Iraq and we know how well that worked out.
To be generous, despite the rhetoric this week, his record is at best patchy.
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Actually Neil it's a part of a fact somewhat misrepresented:
The US stopped Melosevic. It's a fact. No misrepresentation .Of course there are still plenty of left-wing sites that saw and still see this as merely US imperialism. But lucky for the people of Bosnia and Kosovo Clinton took no notice.
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giovanni tiso, in reply to
The US stopped Melosevic. It's a fact.
For that matter you could say that Bush stopped Saddam. So long as you're quite happy to look at recent history through a straw.
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