The drones are coming. Who could have imagined such a science-fiction tale, a president who could kill, via remote control, anyone he declares an enemy of the state – and on American soil. Until now, the White House refused to close the door on such a scenario, despite pretensions of taking civil liberties seriously.

Sen. Rand Paul won a big concession after a filibuster meant to block a vote on the confirmation of John O. Brennan as director of the CIA. On Thursday, the administration finally, after the 13-hour filibuster ended, answered the question it stubbornly would not entertain: Does the president have the authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on American soil? Eric H. Holder Jr., the attorney general who had danced around the question for days, finally replied: “The answer to that question is no.”

As the national security adviser to the president, Mr. Brennan had backed the administration’s practice of using armed, unmanned drones to kill terrorists, mostly in Pakistan and Afghanistan. At his confirmation hearing last month, Mr. Brennan sidestepped questions regarding the constitutional propriety of killing Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen and leader of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen, and whether such killing could happen on American soil. Following the Senate Intelligence Committee‘s approval of Mr. Brennan‘s nomination, Mr. Paul invoked the spirit of Jimmy Stewart in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” (and of Huey P. Long, Strom Thurmond and others), spending 13 hours on his feet on the Senate floor, detailing the folly of confirming the cheerleader for the drones as director of the CIA while fundamental constitutional questions remained unanswered.

The outcry over extrajudicial killings was growing, and the administration was scrambling to avert a public relations disaster. A 16-page Justice Department memorandum was leaked last month in an unsuccessful attempt to allay skepticism over the drone-strike program, in which 2,400 people have been killed. The document laid out conditions for the use of lethal force to kill a terrorist who is an American citizen, including the required approval by “an informed, high-level official,” together with a finding that “capture is infeasible.”

The central question was whether Mr. Obama would ever go that far on U.S. soil. Sen. Ted Cruz, Texas Republican, grilled Mr. Holder about that at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday. After much hesitation, Mr. Holder agreed that such attacks would not be “appropriate,” but stopped short of saying the president’s use of drones to kill such Americans would be unconstitutional.

Clarity is important, because there can be no flexibility on the answer to the question of whether the government can assassinate Americans on American soil, and with weapons intended for foreign battlefields. It’s the job of law enforcement, duly restrained by an independent magistrate and the Constitution, to capture or kill dangerous criminals. If a terrorist can be seen, he can almost certainly be caught.

We all owe thanks to Sens. Paul, Cruz and their “band of brothers” who forced an answer from the Obama administration, but the issue is far from resolved. Rather than taking the president’s word that domestic drone strikes will never be used, Congress must adopt legislation that ensures the president, and all the presidents who follow, will never become the executioner in chief.

Vezi sursa articolului aici.

These are not happy times for the Church of Global Warming, which has been trying to repackage its manufactured hysteria as “climate change” for several years.  But according to the New York Times on Thursday, we’ve actually come full circle to where we began in the Seventies: global cooling.

After some flapdoodle about global temperature spikes (in fact, not only is there no evidence connecting human activity to any such spike, most recent data says there wasn’t much of a “spike,” and what heating occurred mostly leveled out a decade ago) and quoting the ridiculous Michael Mann of “hockey stick graph hoax” fame as an “expert,” the Times casually drops the same narrative that global-warming cultists have decried as heresy for the past thirty years:

Though the paper is the most complete reconstruction of global temperature, it is roughly consistent with previous work on a regional scale. It suggests that changes in the amount and distribution of incoming sunlight, caused by wobbles in the earth’s orbit, contributed to a sharp temperature rise in the early Holocene.

The climate then stabilized at relatively warm temperatures about 10,000 years ago, hitting a plateau that lasted for roughly 5,000 years, the paper shows. After that, shifts of incoming sunshine prompted a long, slow cooling trend.

The cooling was interrupted, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, by a fairly brief spike during the Middle Ages, known as the Medieval Warm Period. (It was then that the Vikings settled Greenland, dying out there when the climate cooled again.)

Scientists say that if natural factors were still governing the climate, the Northern Hemisphere would probably be destined to freeze over again in several thousand years. “We were on this downward slope, presumably going back toward another ice age,” Dr. Marcott said.

Instead, scientists believe the enormous increase in greenhouse gases caused by industrialization will almost certainly prevent that.

Wait, what?  Sunlight affects global temperatures?  Who could have seen that coming?

For the moment, leave aside those sensationalist claims about “enormous increases in greenhouse gases caused by industrialization” – a simple enough observation given that pre-industrial societies produce very little greenhouse gas, outside of human and animal flatulence, but not logically connected to any measurable shift in global climate.  Aren’t these scientists conceding that man-made global warming might be… good?  Wouldn’t that mean the people who have been trying to bankrupt Western industry with madcap environmental laws have also been ignorantly shoving us into the frozen hell of a new Ice Age?

The same thought occurred to a student encountered by British eco-gadfly James Delingpole, writing at the UK Telegraph:

I’ve been at my old school Malvern College all week, poisoning the minds of the young with my dangerous views on sustainability, climate change, “biodiversity” and other sacred green cows. But a lot of the time, it has to be said, my work wasn’t necessary. In one geography class specifically dedicated to climate change, the first kid to stick up his hand said: “What’s wrong with the world getting warmer anyway? It will mean we get nicer summers!”

Which is what the kids would no doubt refer to as an epic fail for all the official propaganda we’ve been fed these last few decades. The boys and girls in that particular class would have been precisely the target audience at which the Labour government aimed its infamous Bedtime Stories advert, the £6 million effort in 2009 commissioned by the Department of Energy and Climate Change to scare impressionable kids witless with tales of a hideous carbon monster which was going to drown their puppies. If the enviro loons can’t even manage to brainwash the young with their lies, spin junk science, what chance do they have with grown ups?

Delingpole goes on to review polling data that shows most of the public doesn’t care about “climate change” and never really did, even back when Western nations weren’t grinding their way through endless recessions and limp “recoveries.”

And yet, the Church of Global Warming rose to incredible power across the West, even as their demands were blithely ignored by authoritarian states.  Countless billions in compulsory tithe has been extracted from taxpayers in America and Europe for this mandatory State religion.  It doesn’t matter that most of the public never really bought into the hype, because they didn’t oppose it strongly enough, and the Left saw it as the perfect vehicle for a profoundly moralistic crusade in favor of Big Government. You planet-ravaging vermin can’t be trusted, with all your dirty machines and consumerist greed!  You must be controlled, and those who resist are enemies of the planet itself, which speaks through a self-appointed environmentalist priesthood.  No debate can be permitted, because we haven’t got a single moment to lose!  And can you really blame us for erring on the side of caution, when the fate of the Earth is at stake?  How can you doubt that industry is killing the world – can’t you see those billowing clouds of smoke, hear the ominous rumble of the machines, and smell the carbon?

But the “consensus” in favor of climate change continues to slip away, with a “shock poll” last year showing that only 30 percent of meteorologists think global warming is worth worrying about.  The radical Greens are reduced to squabbling over slices of a shrinking panic pie, with the wind and solar crowds at each others’ throats, and cultists scrambling to come up with reasons why greenhouse-gas-friendly “fracking” is really the Devil’s work.  This week, Bloomberg News reported that “almost 90 percent of insurance companies lack a comprehensive plan to address climate change, and fewer than half of them view it as a likely source of financial losses.”  The demon lords of global warming are no longer fearsome enough to command billions of dollars, and thousands of jobs, in sacrifice – not when voters worry that something has gone deeply, badly wrong with their economy.

The heck of it all is that global cooling always was the more plausible, scientifically sound threat.  Those solar energy variations really might presage a significant drop in planetary temperature.  But global cooling wasn’t politically useful – it was too difficult to pin on human activity, and too hard to hype with voodoo fearmongering about wild weather patterns.  The people could not easily be convinced that their machines were making the world colder.  When they noticed it wasn’t getting consistently warmer, “global warming” became “climate change.”  Then they noticed that the “climate change” elite wasn’t wasting any time acting as if their extravagant lifestyles were killing the Earth, descending upon million-dollar eco-conferences in mighty fleets of carbon-spewing jets.  Now that Al Gore, the Pope of Global Warming, has lined his pockets with oil money, the game is pretty much over… and we’re left hoping that maybe his propaganda was just a little bit right, because Winter Is Coming, and man-made greenhouse-gas warming might be our best hope against it.

Vezi sursa articolului aici.

Please excuse the radio silence: I’ve been at my old school Malvern College all week, poisoning the minds of the young with my dangerous views on sustainability, climate change, „biodiversity” and other sacred green cows. But a lot of the time, it has to be said, my work wasn’t necessary. In one geography class specifically dedicated to climate change, the first kid to stick up his hand said: „What’s wrong with the world getting warmer anyway? It will mean we get nicer summers!”

Which is what the kids would no doubt refer to as an epic fail for all the official propaganda we’ve been fed these last few decades. The boys and girls in that particular class would have been precisely the target audience at which the Labour government aimed its infamous Bedtime Stories advert, the £6 million effort in 2009 commissioned by the Department of Energy and Climate Change to scare impressionable kids witless with tales of a hideous carbon monster which was going to drown their puppies. If the enviro loons can’t even manage to brainwash the young with their lies, spin junk science, what chance do they have with grown ups?

If I hadn’t been so busy taking classes – never, EVER will I be rude again about the long holidays teachers get: God, they deserve them! – what I would have done much earlier is to draw your attention to this glorious story at the Register. What it shows is that not only do people not care all that much now about „climate change” – but that actually, they never really did. Not in a serious way.

As Lewis Page puts it:

Seventeen years of continuous surveys covering countries around the world show that people not only do not care about climate change today – understandably prioritising economic misery – they also did not care about climate change even back when times were good.

The new information comes in a study released by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago – a large, long-standing and respected non-profit. The results are based on surveys which began in 1993, back in the boom times, and “are the first and only surveys that put long-term attitudes toward environmental issues in general and global climate change in particular in an international perspective,” according to NORC’s Tom W Smith.

According to a NORC statement issued yesterday:

The economy ranked highest in concern in 15 countries, followed by health care in eight, education in six, poverty in two, and terrorism and crime in one country each. Immigration and the environment did not make the top of the list in any country over the 17-year period; in the United States, the economy ranked as the highest concern, while concern for the environment ranked sixth. In terms of national averages, the order of concern was the economy (25 percent); health care (22.2); education (15.6); poverty (11.6); crime (8.6); environment (4.7); immigration (4.1); and terrorism (2.6), the surveys showed.

Not, of course, that public opinion makes the blindest difference to whether something is true or not. It’s just that in this particular instance, of course, public opinion is dead right. Which does make you wonder, though, how it is that the greenies have been able to cause so much mayhem for so long. I hardly need to list for you here the many terrible things that have been done in the name of „saving the planet” and „combating climate change”. We’re talking everything from the trashing of our beautiful landscape with wind farms to the thousands of deaths caused by fuel poverty to the sabotage of the global economy. If – as seems to be the case – this all seems to have done on the say-so of a shrill minority with whom most people, it now turns out, disagreed, then I think we have a right to be even more angry than we were already. Angry, not least, with ourselves for letting mendacious scuzzballs get away with it.

Still, the tide does seem to be turning.

Today, you may have noticed, we had the most tremendous result: the High Court ruling overturning the Planning Inspectorate’s bizarre decision to allow the Duke of Gloucester to erect four 415 foot wind turbines just a mile from the glorious National Trust property of Lyveden New Bield. This was one of the reasons I stood – briefly – as the Anti Wind Farm Candidate in the Corby by-election. I’d just moved into the beautiful and underrated county of Northamptonshire and a local anti-wind farm group invited me over to Lyveden New Bield to inspect the property which was about to be ravaged as a result of yet another posho absentee landlord’s greed. The house itself is just a ruin – or rather, a shell: it was never actually completed. But the reason it’s well worth visiting is to see the remnants of one of the greatest gardens of the Elizabethan age.

There’s more to be said on this – especially concerning the disgraceful role of the Duke of Gloucester, but I shall save that for another occasion. I’m jolly exhausted after my (nearly) week’s tutoring the young in the ways of truth and righteousness. Off now to the gym for a sauna.

Vezi sursa articolului aici.

The European parliament is discussing a „ban on all forms of pornography”, in an attempt to reduce the stereotyping and ill-treatment of women. I dare say it will be unpopular around here, because if anything is likely to make the commenters underneath these blog posts hate the European Union even more, it would be an attempt to ban what’s open right now in your browser’s second tab.

I jest, of course. (Although one or two of you are probably blushing.) But it is going to provoke an almighty row, between the „pornography demeans women and damages men” side and the „a ban on pornography is a blow to free speech” side. Which is funny, because those two sides don’t necessarily disagree about anything: those two statements could both be true.

For a start, there really is a risk of pornography addiction, as my colleague Damian Thompson will tell you (because he’s written a book about addiction generally, The Fix [out now in paperback and available at all good bookstores], I should hastily add, not because he has any special insight into this addiction in particular). It really does lead to compulsive behaviour, for some people, and there has been a suggestion that overconsumption of porn damages sex lives. And I don’t think there’s any real argument that some of the stuff that is portrayed is demeaning, or indeed degrading, to women. Whether it damages men’s attitudes to women I don’t know: it makes intuitive sense, and commentators are quick to blame any sexual bad behaviour on the prevalence of internet porn, but there is an ongoing row over whether or not there is a causal relationship, into which I do not want to get.

But on the other side, the „it’s a blow to free speech” crowd are obviously right. Banning pornography means defining pornography, which when we remember this sorry episode we should realise is not as clear-cut as all that. Another colleague of mine, Willard Foxton, is writing a comical blog about dating, and he reports that every single major mobile provider rates it as „adult content”. Even were we to say those were simply stupid mistakes made by overzealous algorithms, there are going to be things that are borderline. An old friend of mine who did art at university did a whole exhibition of, basically, photos of body parts and rubber models of other body parts and, really, just lots of body parts. Is that art? Is it pornography? Whether you like it or not we’ve got a decision to make, and if the EU is banning porn, then presumably it’ll be the EU that decides what’s too porny for the Tate Modern.

The trouble is, as Daniel Kahneman says in Thinking, Fast and Slow and as I have probably said on here a few times before, we have a mental block when it comes to risks and benefits. Instinctively, if we think something has benefits, we decide it has no risks, and if we think something has risks, we assume it has no benefits. It’s been shown that people (Westerners, at least) who are told that something has more risks than they thought immediately and irrationally downgrade its benefits in their mind as well.

All of which means that people on the „porn causes harm” side will be unlikely to see the risks of a porn-ban, and people on the „free speech is vital” side will be unlikely to see the potential benefits. But for the debate to go anywhere, both sides need to acknowledge that „allowing porn” and „banning porn” both have risks and both have benefits. The question is: what value do we place on free speech as an ultimate good, and what value on protecting people from the potential damage of pornography? Until both sides start admitting the other side has a case, the debate is just pointless shouting.

(NB: I’m told by more techy colleagues that any complete porn ban is completely unworkable anyway, so it’s all academic. But still.)

Read more by Tom Chivers on Telegraph Blogs
Follow Telegraph Blogs on Twitter

Vezi sursa articolului aici.

We can already see the beginnings of an Eva Perón-style death cult. Latin Americans love a martyr, and Hugo Chávez’s early death has sparked bizarre conspiracy theories about CIA plots and biological weapons. Angry, histrionic and megalomaniac, the comandante was none the less popular to the end.

There is an old Venezuelan saying that there are no good nor bad presidents, only presidents when the oil price is high and when it is low. Chávez benefited from an extraordinary spike in the value of his country’s main export, but the wealth did not spill over into the villages and shanty towns. Instead, it was squandered in a series of boondoggles, with so many new ministries created that Venezuelans lost count. The only people who did well were the red-shirted party cadres, who grew rich on state contracts, known as “boligarchs”: a play on the Bolivarian revolution which Chávez had launched.

Why, then, was Chavism so electorally successful – not just in Venezuela but across the region? Chavism, by the way, is an especially apt word for the phenomenon: its exponents like to emphasise their anti-elitism by engaging in foul-mouthed tirades which are shockingly vulgar by the standards of Latin-American political discourse.

Ecuador’s Rafael Correa and Bolivia’s Evo Morales followed the Bolivarian script to the letter, closing down their parliaments and supreme courts, scrapping their constitutions and “refounding” their states on socialist principles. In Brazil, Argentina, Nicaragua, Paraguay and even traditionally staid and bourgeois Uruguay, the outward forms of constitutionalism were respected, but power shifted to bellicose Left-wing populists.

It would be going too far to call these leaders dictators: they are anti-parliamentary rather than anti-democratic. Having got themselves more or less legitimately elected, they dismantle the checks on their power: the judiciary, opposition parties, electoral commissions, private television stations.

In order to remain popular, they have to keep picking fights: with Washington, with the IMF, with “the rich” and, when all else fails, with each other. Chávez was forever threatening Colombia. Morales makes noises about Bolivian provinces lost to Chile in the 19th century. Kirchner stamps and shouts about the Falkland Islands.

It’s a form of displacement activity. The last thing these leaders want is to be judged on their economic record. Despite a commodity boom from which South America ought to have been a massive beneficiary, they have presided over corruption, inflation and shortages.

Why, then, do they keep winning? The answer owes a great deal to the failure of the centre-Right, which had an opportunity in the Nineties and squandered it. Only in Colombia and, to a certain extent, Chile, is there an electorally credible popular conservatism. Elsewhere, Rightist leaders have barely begun to understand the gravity of their predicament, nor to overcome their sense of entitlement. For a long time, politics in Latin America was the province of people with family wealth, white skins and foreign university degrees. Chavism is a 15-year-old reaction against that system. In the poor barrios, with corrugated iron roofs, people vote to punish the old elites.

Latin America’s tragedy is easily summarised. The state does too little and too much. Too little in the sense that it fails to operate a universal system of justice in which property rights are secure, disputes arbitrated by independent magistrates and redress available to individuals; too much in the sense that it runs massive public works schemes, owns large corporations, and buys electoral support by placing voters on the payroll. Such a system cannot fail to be corrupt. If you have a dispute with your neighbour, you don’t rely on the courts; you phone your friend who knows a general. If you want to get rich, you don’t make things or sell things; you secure a government contract. After years of misgovernment, Latin Americans have given up: they elect autocrats not in the hope of a better future, but as a howl of rage.

Is there any hope? Yes. One country that rears above the red tide is Colombia, whose former leader, Alvaro Uribe, achieved a level of popularity that the Bolivarians could only dream of. How? Partly by defeating the terrorist groups and disarming the militias, so that Colombia came back under the rule of law; and partly by a privatisation programme that reduced opportunities for nepotism.

Across most of the continent, though, politics remains a tussle between different statist factions, all seeking to get their hands on the government machine. Many voters have turned away in resignation.

But don’t imagine that it couldn’t happen closer to home. We need only look at the eurozone’s stricken Mediterranean members to see similar conditions forming. Representative democracy is still a relatively new phenomenon in some countries. It may prove more fragile than we think.

Daniel Hannan is a Conservative MEP for South East England

Read more by Daniel Hannan on Telegraph Blogs

Follow Telegraph Blogs on Twitter

Vezi sursa articolului aici.

There’s a wonderful moment in Radical Chic, Tom Wolfe’s essay about the party Leonard and Felicia Bernstein gave for the Black Panthers in their Park Avenue duplex, when Field Marshall John Cox, who’s addressing the assembled group of Upper East Side socialites, refers to „the merchants” who are „the exploiters of the black community”. He’s talking about the Jews, of course, and it strikes a discordant note because a majority of the rich, Left-wing sympathisers at the party are themselves Jewish. „For God’s sake, Cox, don’t open that can of worms,” writes Wolfe.

For those who aren’t sympathetic to fashionable, PC causes, there’s something particularly satisfying about moments like this. Suddenly, the romantic, Left-wing perception of a minority group, which invariably casts them as victims of oppression, runs up against an unwelcome reality, such as the fact that they’re all raving anti-Semites.

There’s a great example of this kind of reality check on the Guardian’s website today. It’s a Comment Is Free piece by a journalist called Nabila Ramdani with impeccable right-on credentials. As she says in her biog (referring to herself in the third person): „She was named a Young Global Leader 2012 by the World Economic Forum and was a winner of the inaugural European Muslim Woman of Influence Award in 2010. She has been named by DNA (Decide Now Act) as one of 101 most innovative individuals in the world for social good.”

In the article, Ramdani describes her disappointment that the Gaza marathon, which was due to take place on 10th April, has been cancelled. Ramdani, who’s of Algerian descent, had planned to compete in the marathon to express her solidarity with the poor, benighted victims of Israeli imperialist aggression. „Through spending a few agonising hours with the ordinary people of Gaza on their war-ravaged roads, we would not only be able to empathise with their despair, but publicise it to the world outside,” she writes.

Alas, she can no longer make this noble gesture. Why? Because the marathon has been cancelled following the decision of Hamas to ban women from participating. Turns out that the political party Ramdani describes as an „Islamic resistance movement” – in reality, a Holocaust-denying terrorist organisation hell bent on the destruction of Israel – isn’t particularly keen on equal rights for women. Women running in marathons – even if their bodies are covered from head to foot – is „un-Islamic”, apparently. Who would have thunk it?

Ramdani is understandably disappointed. Not because she’s finally woken up to the fact that her beloved Gaza is, in fact, a one-party state controlled by a bunch of Islamist thugs who have scant regard for the rights of women or, indeed, any other minorities. No, she’s disappointed because Hamas has thrown away an opportunity „to draw attention to what is arguably the most pressing political problem in the Middle East, if not the world, today”. That’s Israel’s „oppression” of Gaza and the West Bank, obviously, not the state-orchestrated genocide currently taking place in Syria.

That’s the problem with reality checks. You’d think a Left-wing feminist might be pulled up short by the discovery that the „Islamic resistance movement” she’s making common cause with turns out to be deeply misogynistic. But no. The important thing is to stay focused on the wickedness of Israel. As Albert Einstein said, „If the facts don’t fit the theory, change the facts.”

I would love to have been present at the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights in Gaza when Hamas dropped this bombshell. Though I couldn’t hope to produce something as brilliant as Tom Wolfe’s essay. Well worth a read, by the way. The whole piece, which was originally the cover story of the 8th June 1970 issue of New York magazine, can be read here.

Read more by Toby Young on Telegraph Blogs

Follow Telegraph Blogs on Twitter

Vezi sursa articolului aici.

This article in the Independent might just be the most dispiriting thing I have read so far this year. It is a long list of tips about “what is and isn’t acceptable in the modern workplace” and how one can avoid finding oneself in the same position as Lord Rennard – that is, accused of sexually harassing one’s colleagues. You might expect the advice to include stuff like “don’t pat anyone’s bum” or “don’t photocopy pictures of your privates and leave them on a colleague’s desk”, which are the kind of workplace codes I could get behind. But it goes much further than that. Apparently the best way to avoid being accused of inappropriate behaviour in the workplace is to turn yourself into an emotional cripple who never says anything nice or complimentary, far less cheeky, to your colleagues.

So, for example, if you’ve been thinking about complimenting a female colleague on her pretty dress or a male colleague on his spiffing new haircut, think again. The Independent advises that when it comes to compliments, “non-safe topics include hair, shoes and cleavages”, and “safe topics” include “work and… that’s it”. That is, you can tell a colleague that he or she is doing a good job, but not that they look cute or well-coiffured. If you are still determined to compliment colleagues on non-work things, apparently there’s a right way and a wrong way to do it: an etiquette expert tells the Indie that compliments must be relayed from a “respectable distance” rather than being whispered in someone’s ear. Perhaps people should carry metre-long rulers at work, which they might whip out whenever they want to say something nice to a colleague from a respectable, non-leering distance.

Older people must be especially careful in the workplace, because apparently their preferred terms of endearment – love, darling, sweetheart – are criminally archaic. The Independent says it is problematic to behave in an “avuncular manner” in the workplace. An expert tells the paper that older workers should not use old-fashioned terms like “love” unless they would be comfortable with being called “grandpa” or “village elder”. But isn’t this just the petty policing of the kind of lingo used largely by working-class people of a certain age? In one of my old workplaces, the older men uniformly referred to every young woman as “sweetheart” and every young man, including me, as “son”. It was nice. It made a rather stressful workplace environment feel more familial and pleasant. Little did I know that I and everyone else were actually being talked down to by patronising letches.

Also, you should never discuss celebrities’ sex lives at work, because others might find it offensive. You should distance yourself from flirtatious workmates, even if that makes you seem like an “officious, stuck-in-the-mud, Billy no-mates”. And you must never, ever try to get into a sexual relationship with a workmate; in response to the question of how an office friendship might be taken to “a sexual level”, the Independent and its expert advisers basically say: “Don’t even think about it.” “It’s not illegal”, we’re told (which will be a relief to the hundreds of thousands of couples who met through work), “but it’s not a good idea, either”. So even asking a colleague out on a date, with an eye for, you know, sleeping with him/her, is a big no-no these days.

The problem with such stifling, emotion-squishing codes of conduct is that they turn the 21st-century workplace into an emotional deadzone, bereft of niceness and pleasantries and even compliments. I am not – repeat, not – saying, “Why shouldn’t old farts be allowed to manhandle female staff or bombard them with sexual jokes?” Of course male bosses, or any working man, should not behave like that. But I am saying: why shouldn’t we be able to talk to and engage with and maybe even flirt with our colleagues in a way that workers have been doing for donkey’s years? One of the things that makes work more bearable for millions of people is the camaraderie they build up with their colleagues, which they often do through speaking to each other in a free and relaxed manner that is not overseen by their boring managers or HR busybodies. In turning the workplace into a moral minefield where no one can ever truly chill out, we aren’t really combatting rare instances of serious sexual harassment – we’re just alienating workers from each other and turning the workplace into a more soul-destroying arena than it needs to be.

Vezi sursa articolului aici.

Various dictators, killers and fruitcakes are fighting back manly tears today. If a leader can be judged by his friends, then the fact that the world’s most brutal regimes have paid fulsome tribute to Hugo Chavez reveals much about the late Commandante.

In Syria, Bashar al-Assad’s regime praised Chavez for his „honourable” support of, well, Bashar al-Assad. Chavez had „stood on the side of the Arabs’ legitimate rights” and opposed “the conspiracy against Syria,” said the official news agency in Damascus. Let’s remember that last October, Chavez declared: “How can I not support Assad? He’s the legitimate leader.”

As it happens, Assad inherited the presidency of Syria from his father in the style of an absolute monarch. If Chavez considered him “legitimate”, then this great socialist must also have been a supporter of the hereditary principle.

You will not be surprised to read that the most quixotic tribute of all came from President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran. Hailing Chavez’s human virtues was not quite enough; Ahmadinejad also praised the late president in quasi-religious terms.

Remember that Ahmadinejad thinks the 12th Imam of the Shia faith (known as the “perfect human”) will one day return to rule the world in peace and justice. The Imam will, according to his tradition, come back with Jesus Christ as his loyal lieutenant. But Ahmadinejad thinks the “perfect human” will need more help. To make his entourage even more distinguished, Hugo Chavez will apparently be along as well.

Thus Ahmadinejad hailed the „brave, strong” Commandante, adding: „I have no doubt that he will return, along with the righteous Jesus and the perfect human.”

Where does one begin with a statement like that? Forget the millenarian mysticism for a moment and remember that Ahmadinejad helps to run a militarised, repressive, ultra right-wing theocracy. Meanwhile, Assad is the besieged figurehead of a de facto monarchy.

No genuine, Left-wing progressive should have anything to do with them. Except that both are virulently anti-American. And that, in Chavez’s eyes, meant they should be forgiven any crime and praised to the skies. This is not the axis of evil, but the axis of absurdity.

Read more by David Blair on Telegraph Blogs

Follow Telegraph Blogs on Twitter

Vezi sursa articolului aici.

Nu Germania a dat lovitura de gratie Romaniei, ci USL care a adus tarii doua rapoarte MCV critice consecutive si ii mentine in Guvern pe Fenechiu si Dragnea, ministri cu probleme penale nerezolvate, in loc sa renunte la ei, pentru ca Europa nu are incredere intr-un astfel de Guvern.

Vezi sursa articolului aici.

In a recent interview with the Voice of Russia radio, Iraqi Minister of Foreign Affairs Hoshyar Zebari confirmed that Iraq would receive its first supply of arms shipments from Russia before the beginning of the summer, at the latest.

Russia is currently waiting for the Iraqi parliament to approve its 2013 federal budget, which has earmarked its first payment of the $4.2 billion total to Moscow for the weapons deal.

As part of the deal, Russia will supply Iraq with 50 Pantsir-S1 gun-missile short-range air defense systems and 30 advanced Mi-28NE attack helicopters.

The deal was originally announced on October 9, 2012, following a meeting between Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his Russian counterpart Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, in Moscow.

Unconcerned about what the United States would have to say about the sale, Prime Minister al-Maliki insisted, “Iraq needs Russia’s support in building up its military and defense areas, in order to protect the country from terrorism.”

The deal appeared to collapse when “Ali al-Mussawi, the media advisor to the Iraqi prime minister, announced in December 2012 the cancellation of the arms deal with Russia,” amidst “corruption concerns,” according to Al-Monitor.

Now, however, Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari noted otherwise during his interview. “Iraq and Russia will proceed with the arms deal signed by Maliki during his most recent visit to Moscow,” he stated.

Al-Monitor reported that earlier this year:

Maliki sent a delegation of army officers and weapons experts – headed by Iraqi Deputy Chief of Staff of Operations for the Iraqi Joint Forces Headquarters Gen. Aboud Kanbar – to Moscow to renegotiate the arms deal.

Iraq, according to Al-Monitor, “lacks defense capabilities to protect its border, airspace and maritime territory.” While still receiving U.S. aid, Iraq has turned again to Russia for its security needs.

Prior to the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, which ousted Saddam Hussein and his Ba’athist Arab Socialist regime, Russia was the main exporter of arms to Iraq.

Now, after eight years of U.S. interventionism in Iraq, Baghdad remains a client state of Russia.

Both Sunni and Shiite factions in Iraq’s parliament are in agreement to return to pre-war arms arrangements with Moscow, maintaining high-level contacts with the Kremlin.

In October 2012, the Rossiyskaya Gazeta quoted Medvedev corroborating the continuity of this policy. “Despite the dramatic developments of recent years, we maintain contacts on the highest levels, and I am confident that this will help promote friendship, cooperation, and mutual understanding between Russia and Iraq,” Medvedev said.

This becomes even more ironic considering the following remarks given by Vice President Dick Cheney during a speech in Italy in September of 2008. “Russia has sold advanced weapons to regimes in Syria and Iran. Some of the Russian weapons sold to Damascus have been channeled to terrorist fighters in Lebanon and Iraq,” Cheney said.

For Russia, this will be its largest foreign military deal since 2006, and it also demonstrates its increasing influence in the Middle East, while that of the United States and the West as a whole continues to wane.

Meanwhile, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has expressed his desire to withdraw Turkey from talks over its long-proposed membership in the European Union, opting instead to join the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which is an economic-military pact headed by Russia and China.

“I told Russian President [Vladimir] Putin, ‘You should include us in the Shanghai Five and we will say farewell to the European Union,’” Erdogan said about his prospects of joining the SCO. Pakistan and India, also allies of the United States during the previous administration of President George W. Bush are now moving toward Moscow’s orbit, as Russian President Putin has encouraged their speedy membership into the SCO.

Although Iraq has made no formal request about joining the SCO, at least not publicly, its neighbor Iran has. Considering also Baghdad’s currently increasing, friendly relations with Moscow and Tehran, the thought of an SCO/Russia allied-Iraq may not be that far–fetched, thus spelling greater uncertainty for the future role of the United States overseas.

Vezi sursa articolului aici.