And the changing international landscape adds to Obama's lack of action

And Philip Stephens, of the Financial Times, here, explains how the changing global landscape is leaving the US as an insufficient super power and the Obama administration asking for cooperation. 

Barack Obama's Faltering Leadership

Steven Hill of The Guardian nails it. However, this is hardly a surprise. Even if he wasn't just a centrist most strongly committed to restoring business as usual, Barack Obama would have had trouble changing anything in a declining superpower that's horribly ill-equiped for change (psychologically, ideologically and physically).

"To this one-time Trotskyite, ideology was the enemy of reason and it had to be fought."

Melanie Phillips tells you everything you need to know about the now-deceased Irving Kristol in a single sentence.

This Speaks For Itself, Really

Credit to Mr. John Estes for spotting this. Terrifying yet priceless!

The Beat Goes On

Tiarks's 1st Law of the Institutional Economics of Sexual Depravity in action again.

Wonky Policies...

A couple of months ago, Gordon Brown made the ridiculous claim of 'local homes for local people.' This bizarre policy, based on no facts at all, gave some great headline opportunities for ignorant tabloids and ooops, a small problem with the matter of legality.

You see the problem with this policy, was that it was addressing a non-existent issue. There is no magic housing queue for migrants.

Now I thought that was ridiculous, until I heard this... Now this piece glosses over the nitty gritty of this little government initiative nicely, so here's the simple version.

1. People aren't happy because there's a recession on. Quite rightly, a lot of them are pretty messed up by it. (Actually they were pretty messed up before it too...)
2. Some, particularly those in deprived communities, feel angry that they are not appropriately served by the public sector when they need it most.
3. Many are blaming the myth that the public sector treats migrants better than local people.
4. Community cohesion is under threat. (More so than before, apparently)

With me so far? OK. So here is the government response...

5. Because of the above, we need to target the most deprived communities and demonstrate how local authorities are committed to supporting their residents through the recession.
6. This will be done through a series of interventions aimed at the indigenous white population, to counterbalance the myth that the non-white non-indigenous population are favoured.

Are you confused by the logic here? Let me simplify this a bit

1. People still believe WRONGLY that the government favours migrants and/or anyone who isn't white over locals.
2. To bust this myth, the government are going to implement a series of programmes to treat white local people better.
3. The hoped for result is that the white people live happily ever after, the non-whites have to live with it and Labour win a few votes back from the BNP.

I've always thought that myth busting was a little bit twee. But perpetuating a myth that you know is a myth so you can look like you are addressing the issue?

Shameful.

Looking for meaning in all the wrong places

Can someone please help me parse what the hell Melanie Phillips's point is in this post?

She's upset about a BBC report by Katya Adler that said armed Rabbis in the IDF were a sign that Israel was turning the fight with the Palestinians into more of a holy war, because, as she rightly points out, it's not really that unusual to have a bit of religion in the army:

[T]he British army has military chaplains who are also officers.

Does seem to smack of double standards. And the logic, as Mel points out, would seem to be faulty:

Adler made this leap because to her, all orthodox Jewish religious observance is extreme, right-wing and aggressive; all settlers are orthodox and therefore extreme, right-wing and aggressive; thus all orthodox Jewish soldiers are settlers and therefore they are all extreme, right-wing and aggressive.

But the army is for all Israelis, not just the religious ones, it's a secular state thing:

The settlers believe the land was given to them by God, she charged. Well, they may well do so; but as Israel’s soldiers they are fighting to defend not the settlements but the State of Israel of which they are citizens and to which land they are fully and indisputably entitled under international law. Indeed, contrary to what she stated they are also entitled under international law to settle the disputed territories which are still the site of aggressive war waged against them; but that’s not in fact what they are in the IDF or were in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead to do.

Yes I know. But leave aside Mel's grip on the finer points of international law and English grammar for a moment, and it gets better still. Because half of Israel seems to be saying the same thing Adler's saying:

True, she was not short of Israelis to say all this: to make the direct equation between religious orthodoxy in the IDF and ‘holy war’.

If half of Israel thinks there's taht there's a nutty "Holy War" element to the IDF's mission, then we should probably listen. I mean they'd know, right. Apparently not:

Israel is a society which is deeply, even violently polarised between secular and religious. Quite unlike Britain, America or Europe there is simply no middle ground in Israel where people can be moderately religious and straddle the two worlds. You either belong to one side or the other; and each views the other as utterly dangerous and threatening. With no acknowledgement whatever of that crucial context for these Israelis’ remarks, Adler was able to use Israeli Jews to make her repellent case for her, that the IDF rabbis are as bad as the jihadis and that Jewish religious belief is beyond the moral pale.

You see, in suggesting that some Israelis think that other Israelis are dangerous religious nutters, Adler ommited the crucial context, which is that some Israelis think other Israelis are dangerous religious nutters.

Because of the extreme hostility by secular Israelis towards religion, Israel's education system leaves many of them with scant idea – just like Katya Adler – that the people, the religion and the land are inseparable and bound together by the thousands of years of history of the Jewish people in the land. It is a history many of them only learn for the first time when they join the IDF, which has to make up the appalling deficiencies in their education by taking them to places like Masada to teach them precisely what it is they are defending.

So the IDF is in the business of teaching its recruits "that the people, the religion and the land are inseperable and bound together by the thousands of years of history of the Jewish people in the land", and that's why they should fight? Wasn't Mel meant to be defending the IDF against that sort of thing at the beginning of the post?

Seriously, what am I missing?