The Imperial History of the Middle East

...in 90 seconds.

Michael J Fox Responds To Rush Limbaughs Lies

In an exclusive interview with CBS' Katie Couric, Michael J Fox responds to Rush Limbaugh's allegations that he (Fox) deliberately didn't take his medication in order to exaggerate the symptoms of Parkinson's.

Recovery Trail

Not being able to fly, I was driven back to LA from San Francisco on Thursday morning. Thursday afternoon and all day Friday consisted of multiple x-rays and doctor visits. All the broken bones were confirmed. Lungs seem relatively clear. Fortunately, everything else looks good. Now it all about pain management and healing. It should take about 6 weeks for the breaks to fix themselves, 3 months before feeling like I have fully recovered. Breathing is difficult given the ribs breaks, but that too should improve as the ribs heal.

Thanks for all the help, offers of help and well wishes from colleagues/friends/cycling buddies etc..
I shall be catching up with everyone very soon.

Bike accident…No car involved?

I now bolster the statistic that shows the majority of bike accidents resulting in hospitalisation are not the result of cars or their drivers.

Whilst I live in the Los Angeles area, I am currently in San Francisco until Thursday 26^th for the Oracle Open World Conference. Like many dedicated bike racers I brought my bike with me; the plan being to get in some early morning scenic miles on either side of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Sunday evening at 4:30 pm, taking a casual ride through the Presidio of San Francisco, descending on a left-hand bend, my wheels got fixed in a narrow depression/groove in the road. Slowing, slowing, still slowing, I ran out of road before being able to pull out of the rut, striking the steel roadside barrier. Even though my speed had been cut, it was not enough to prevent me from being tossed onto the barrier with the right-side of my back / chest striking the top corner of one of the 8 sq inch wooden blocks that support it.

The impact was traumatic. Gasping for air, unable to move, focusing only on remaining conscious, breathing and seeing my kids again, I lay in the ditch hoping the rescue services would be there soon. The car behind me witnessed the entire event and was able to call 911 immediately. Incredibly they arrived within two to three minutes. (Thank you SFFD). Within a frantic few minutes they had taped my head down, secured my neck and back and hauled me out of the ditch and into the back of the ambulance.

A 10-15 minute ride in the back of the ambulance still concentrating on trying to breath in a regular pattern and remaining conscious seemed like it would never end. Having arrived at the San Francisco General Hospital Trauma Unit I was diagnosed (after x-rays and CT scans) with 6 fractured ribs, 2 fractured vertebrae and a collapsed right lung. (Road rash and cuts don’t rank sufficiently to warrant mentioning).

When a lung is punctured it usually sucks in blood or other fluids; in my case both. An surgical procedure to cut through the chest so that a tube could be inserted into my right lung was performed. The tube in fact served two purposes; draining the lung and also facilitating the natural re-inflation of the lung once drainage was complete.

Now as you might imagine, the Trauma Unit in San Francisco is not only a busy place but one that brings in all walks of life. Lying for three hours in the trauma unit corridor as ‘next-in-line” for a CT scan, I was bumped time and again by what seemed like a constant flow of pediatric emergency CT scans. I could not tell what was going on with most of these cases though there was one kid that had been attacked on the back of the head and neck by a dog. Another case involved a patient in chains with two SFPD officers at his side. He had had his lips bitten off during an altercation with a fellow inmate. By far the most common admittance was of motorcyclists being separated from their motorbikes. These patients were usually the loudest as each underwent the removal of grit from their extensive road-rash.

Tuesday evening. I should be at the Elton John concert (apparently Oracle are paying him $6million to play for the conference attendees, of which there are about 50,000), but instead I am being discharged from the hospital to return to my hotel room. The insertion that was made to re-inflate the lung means that I cannot fly for 6 months. So tomorrow we will need to make arrangements for driving my back down to L.A. on Thursday.

Morphine, Percoset, Vocodin ... the wonders of pain medication. Fingers crossed for tonight……and a special thanks to some special people (you know who you are) who have stepped up to help both me and my wife though this unfortunate situation.

Random Graffito

A lifesize stencil of Jack the Ripper in the heart of his former stomping ground. The stark silhouette managed to scare the bejesus out of some passers-by, hugging the wall of Parliament Court as one approaches from Artillary Passage. The Ripper would have known these alleys well, and commited his most gruesome murder on the next block.

Judging from Flickr, this one's been up since early August, but no one seems to know who's behind it. Whoever stenciled this, it's an excellent example of how graffiti can work with, and add to, the character of an area. Don't you agree?

Under Bush's law, guilty until confirmed guilty

When President George W. Bush rammed the bill on military commissions through Congress, the Republicans crowed about creating a process that would be tough on terrorists but preserve essential principles of justice. "America can be proud," said Senator Lindsey Graham, one of the bill's architects.

Unfortunately, Graham was wrong. One of the many problems with the new law is that it will only make it harder than it already is to separate the real terrorists from the far larger group of inmates at the American military detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, who were bit players in the Taliban or innocent bystanders.

Graham and other supporters of this dreadful legislation seem to have forgotten that Amerian justice does not merely deliver swift punishment to the guilty. It also protects the innocent.

Bush ignored that fact after the Sept. 11 attacks, when he tried to put the prisoners of the war on terror beyond the reach of American law and the Geneva Conventions. For starters, he dispensed with one of the vital provisions of the conventions: that prisoners must be screened by a "competent tribunal" if there is any doubt about who they are and what role they played in hostilities.

As a result, hundreds of men captured in Afghanistan and other countries were sent to Guantánamo Bay and other prisons, including the network of illegal CIA detention camps, without any attempt to determine whether they were any sort of combatant, legal or illegal.

The Bush administration showed not the slightest interest in fixing this problem until the Supreme Court said in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld that the president cannot simply lock up anyone - even a foreign citizen - without giving him a real chance to challenge his detention before a "neutral decision maker."

In response, Bush created Combatant Status Review Tribunals, which gave the most cursory possible reviews of the Guantánamo detainees. These reviews took place years after the prisoners were captured. They permitted the use of hearsay evidence, evidence obtained through coercion and even torture, and evidence that was kept secret from the prisoner. The normal burden of proof was reversed: The tribunals presumed prisoners were justifiably detained and the prisoners had the burden of disproving government evidence - presuming they knew what it was in the first place.

The new law makes this mockery of justice stronger. The Military Commissions Act of 2006 makes it virtually impossible to contest a status tribunal's decision. It prohibits claims of habeas corpus - the ancient right of prisoners in just societies to have their detentions reviewed - or any case based directly or indirectly on the Geneva Conventions. Even if an appeal got to the single appeals court now authorized to hear it, the administration would be very likely to argue that it cannot be heard without jeopardizing secrets, as it has done repeatedly.

The new law dangerously expands the definition of illegal enemy combatant and allows Bush - and the secretary of defense - to give to anyone they choose the authority to designate a prisoner as an illegal combatant. It also allows Bush to go on squirreling prisoners away at secret CIA camps where none of the rules apply.

Bush wants Americans to trust him to apply these powers only to truly dangerous men. Even if the American system were based on that sort of personal power and not the rule of law, it would be hard to trust the judgment of a president and an administration whose records are so bad. The United States has yet to acknowledge that it kidnapped an innocent Canadian citizen and sent him to be abused in a Syrian prison. In another case, a German citizen has accused the United States of grabbing him off the streets of Macedonia, drugging him and sending him to Afghanistan, where he was brutally treated. Then there is the Ethiopian living in London who said he was grabbed by American agents and brutalized by Moroccan torturers until he confessed to plotting with Jose Padilla to set off a "dirty bomb." Padilla was never charged with the crime. The Ethiopian remains at Guantánamo Bay.

Republicans who support the new law like to point out that it only covers foreigners. But Americans have never believed that human rights are just for Americans.

The United States is outraged when an authoritarian government jails an American, or one of its own citizens, on trumped-up charges and brings him or her before a phony court. Surely that is not the model that Americans want to follow in their own prisons.

A Look at Floyd's Case

Hm, I sense another high traffic day coming on. This is getting interesting in a hurry...

I've downloaded the slide show offered by Landis on his website and parsed a few arguments from it. At least from a cursory review of the slideshow, which itself is a cursory review of his case, it looks like he cites the lab for a seemingly unending chain of typos concerning the ID number of the subject rider, making one wonder who exactly was being tested. These aren't to be lightly dismissed, but it seems like there are three bigger points to his case.

On the flip...

First point: The sample was contaminated and therefore unreliable.

Remember: More than 5% means the specimen is contaminated or degraded and should not be used. Just like food with mold or maggots, such a sample should not be used. The table shows the math: 7.7% degraded epitestosterone. According to WADA protocol, since the epitestosterone level exceeds 5% (it is 7.7%) the specimen should not have been evaluated for an adverse analytic finding. It should have stopped here.

Pretty straightforward. Sounds like a decent case right there, at least until we hear from the prosecution.

Point two: there is a huge disparity in test results.

When the sample was screened for T:E ratio, the calculated ratio was 4.4. When the sample was tested to confirm the ratio, it was 11.8.

Hm, 4.4 is itself a problem, I seem to recall, so I'm not sure they want to pin their hopes on this point too much, but the threefold increase suggests some serious inconsistency in what (we're led to assume) should be a very consistent process.

Point three: the Carbon radioisotope test was applied four times, with three negative results.

Considering the criteria for positive (3.0) and stated accuracy of the lab (±0.8) isotope absolute values must be higher than 3.8. Only one of Floyd's four breakdown products examined even arguably met the criteria to determine a positive result.

OK, so here a 3.0 or higher is a positive test, with 0.8 variable, making 3.8 or higher a clear positive. Floyd's four results were 2.02, 3.51, 2.65, and 6.39. The next slide explains that for some reason the 2.65 result was from the application that should be the most reliable. Making the score one positive, one maybe that looks bad, one maybe that looks good (if the variable is 0.8, then you have to score under 2.2 for a definitive negative), and one clear negative. Now, Jacobs' statement that only one result "even arguably" is positive is overblown -- arguably three of them raise concerns, but only one of them is inarguably positive. Conclusion:

[chirp... chirp...]

For all I know the arguments I skipped over here (e.g. the low testosterone conundrum) are actually more powerful, but these three excerpts are fairly simple cases drawn from empirical data, all of which suggest the case against Landis is somewhere between foggy and complete bullshit. I hate to get sucked in by an accused rider, but this is a far cry from a "disappearing twin" hypothesis. I had wanted to tune out the Landis litigation, but that's not possible anymore.

To fly or not to fly?

Should we still be flying? It’s a loaded question and one that gets some heated responses

Is it frivolous to fly so much?

A few months ago I read a story by TV presenter Nicholas Crane, who gave up flying 10 years ago.

Nicholas was a travel writer for twenty years, which meant he spent the better part of two decades jetting around the world.

But following a particularly harrowing lecture at the Royal Geographical Society on global warming, he decided that his actions were damaging the environment.

Wracked with guilt, he saw only one solution: give up flying.

His article generated a huge response from readers. Some hailed him a hero. Others called him a hypocrite. A few even contested that flying has an impact on climate change at all.

It can’t be denied that carbon emission from airplanes are damaging. A return flight to India, for example, releases around two tons of carbon per passenger.

That’s about the same amount as each Indian produces in two years.

Three per cent of all carbon emissions are attributed to air transport – and although that doesn’t sound like that much, the percentage is likely to soar in the next few decades.

And it’s not just an issue of carbon emissions, either.

There’s the issue of ‘radiative forcing’. This is when plane vapour trails, or contrails, persist for hours in the atmosphere and behave in the same way as high altitude cirrus clouds, which trap warmth in the atmosphere.

So what do we do? The Bishop of London has argued that we have a moral obligation to be environmentally friendly. Jetting away for a holiday, he says, is a sin.

And yet we’re all flying more, thanks in no small part to the low-cost carriers.

In Europe alone, no-frills flights have doubled in the last five years. Perhaps we should be avoiding long-haul destinations and sticking instead to trains and cars and bikes.

Avoiding flying is certainly becoming a more popular notion.

The travel section recently launched a new Going green column, which focuses on European destinations which can easily be visited by train. It seems a sensible option – why fly when you don’t have to?

Alternatively, there are now a number of schemes which let us “off-set” our flight emissions, where you pay a company or charity to plant trees or invest in energy-saving projects in developing countries. This should, in theory, make your flight “carbon neutral”.

Wham Bam It's Christmas Time!

Puffy haired pop duo Wham are staging a special one-off Christmas gig complete with backing singers Pepsi and Shirlie!

A friend revealed to British newspaper The Sunday Mirror, "George is thrilled that Andrew's agreed to perform. "It was something George had thought about for a long time. He couldn't be happier and can't wait for the gig."

This news comes hot on the heels of reports that BMG will not drop the pop megastar after he was found "slumped in a stupor in his car" last week after a few too many puffs on a big fat doobie.

The label said they supported Michael fully and added, "We'd never tell him what to do...We never bully our artists. If there was a time when record companies did that, it is long gone."

So far so exciting - all we need now is the immortal line - "Ladies and Gentlemen, Mister Elton John!".

I still can't believe people didn't realise he was gay...

Smoke & Mirrors

The Blitz may have been started entirely by accident, it was claimed yesterday. A Luftwaffe pilot may have kick-started the second Great Fire of London by dumping unused bombs on the East End instead of the English Channel.

During the war, it was common practice on both sides (for reasons of safety) to jettison surplus ammo in the Channel before heading for home. But Captain Rudolph Hellensleben – recommended for the German equivalent of the Victoria Cross, for acts of 'bravery' – may well have dumped his excess payload too soon, secret documents reveal.

The documents list all the Captain's raids including one just days before the Blitz, in which he mistakenly hit civilian targets on London's outskirts. The papers are part of a private collection being auctioned in Shropshire on the 25th of this month.

Directly because of this act of incompetence, Churchill ordered a smattering of bombs to be delivered with his warmest regards to the people of Berlin. A garden shed was apparently damaged in the attack. Hitler, an amateur gardening enthusiast, was incensed and retaliated by withdrawing a previous ruling of his that Central London was not to be targeted.

Capt. Hellensleben also took part in the first (official) London raid on Black Saturday, September the 7th, 1940.

Image culled from Google.

Floyd Landis Takes His Case to the People

This, ladies and gentlemen, is what the Internet was created for: Floyd Landis, the tainted Tour de France winner, has used his website to post a voluminous defense against doping charges. The material includes:

+ his attorney’s motion for dismissal

+ a “complete World Anti-Doping Agency document package, inclusive of the testing information from Landis’s ‘A’and ‘B’ samples”

+ a PowerPoint presentation including: “the details of the carbon isotope ratio test (CIR), demonstrating that the CIR conducted on Landis’s urine sample does not meet the WADA criteria for a positive doping test … Demonstration of an unacceptable variation in sample testing results … [and] Errors in fundamental testing procedure and protocol”

I haven’t had a chance to look at this material yet, but figured a lot of you might like to know about this. Here are some other articles posted on Landis here and here and here.

A Photo a Day - How to change your Perspective on ...

This sounds like quite an undertaking but in reality, how long can it take to snap a picture a day? Once you understand the point of this, you can see why I think we're giving this a shot at home (with our kids).

Photojojo shares how a normal guy snapped a picture each day for a year and the memories he now will carry forever. How many little things do you forget about? If you're like me, a ton. In fact, most of the things I forget are those good little moments at home that get lost in the daily grind. I'd like to keep that goodness because next year I may need it to get me out of a slump.

Taking a photo a day is a big undertaking with big payoffs. Here are just a few reasons why you should consider doing it:

• Imagine being able to look back at any day of your year and recall what you did, who you met, what you learned… (Often we find it hard to remember what we did just yesterday or even last night, let alone a whole year ago!)
  


• Your year-long photo album will be an amazing way to document your travels and accomplishments, your haircuts and relationships. Time moves surprisingly fast.
  


• Taking a photo a day will make you a better photographer. Using your camera every day will help you learn its limits. You will get better at composing your shots, you’ll start to care about lighting, and you’ll become more creative with your photography when you’re forced to come up with something new every single day.

Read more at Photojojo

How to Google from your Cell Phone

A few months back while traveling, I had some time to kill in between meetings. Unfamiliar with the area, I used the Google SMS service to locate a bike store (because I admit to being a bike fanatic). I entered the search on my cell and within 1 minute, I had the address and phone number of 2 high end bike stores in the vicinity.

This morning the Cool Tools site shares how to actually use the service:

The steps (given by Google):
1. Start a new text message and type in your search query
2. Send the message to the number "46645" (GOOGL)
3. You'll receive text message(s) with results

One of the tough things is understanding what to enter and what Google understands. Here is a few samples:


To get business listings:

• Enter what you want to find. You can search for either a specific business (Pizza Hut) or a general service (pizza).
  
• Make sure to include both a city and state, or a zip code with your search terms.
• If you want to make sure you get local listings, put a period between the business name and the location ('pizza.10013' or 'pottery barn.boston ma')'

To get driving directions, use any of the following combinations as your query:

• Address + zip code
• Address + city + state
• City + state
  
• City (for major metropolis)
• Zip code
• Airport code (e.g., EWR for Newark Liberty Airport, LAX for Los Angeles Airport)

To get answers:
Sample queries:

• population of Japan
• Mark Twain's real name
• who wrote hamlet

There are a ton of things you can do. If you want to read up on more options, go to Google SMS.
Visit Cool Tools for more, well, Cool Tools.

The bi-coastal bug

Two and a half years ago I traded New York for Los Angeles - and from time to time I need to reflect on what proper city living is all about.

New York's grit is an antidote to LA's glam

It’s a radical transition – to palm trees from skyscrapers, foot to freeway, seansons to sunshine and non-stop, in-your-face hustle and bustle to selective human contact.

New York is an invigorating place and a great reminder of the infectious buzz the combination of frantic industry, crowds and a spectacular urban setting can create.

For me, New York is normally the geographic halfway point to London. In many ways, of course, it’s far closer to the UK capital, my former home of a decade, than LA.

Both New York and London are cultural hubs brimming with creativity and multifarious experience, oversubscribed and overpriced with signature skylines and majestic landmarks. Both have proper public transport, cold weather and permanent branches of the exclusive members club Soho House.

It’s not surprising many London-to-New York transplants find they are frequently torn between the two.

Los Angeles and New York are much more distant relatives. So much so I always find it puzzling when people declare themselves truly bicoastal, unable to choose just one, with an apartment in both cities and a life split between the two.

Manhattan is compact, a pedestrian’s paradise. Los Angeles is a sea of never-ending development and a hundred different cities, most accessible only by car. Parts of downtown LA yet to receive the developer’s makeover - the fashion district or Broadway – may feel like a movie set built to resemble 1940s New York.

But many of the wealthier enclaves, with their ostentatious mansions, desert vegetation and infinity pools, couldn’t be further from NY’s urban grey. Then there are artsy beach communities of Santa Monica and Venice where the beautiful disco dance on roller-skates or haul themselves into the surf. You don’t see much of that on Park Avenue.

LA is mainly low-rise. The car is king. You don’t think twice before driving 20 miles for dinner and people’s homes are, compared to Manhattan, vast.

In LA, you can climb a vertiginous canyon trail amid lizards and cicadas and feel miles from the city, only to turn a corner and spy shimmering sprawl stretching to the horizon. It can take an hour to travel five miles. There are so many car crashes LA has its own accident lexicon such as ‘the sig alert’: “any unplanned event that causes the closing of one lane of traffic for 30 minutes or more”.

But you can also feel a bit removed from other people. In New York there’s no escaping the density – 10,300 people per square kilometer as opposed to 3,100 – and there’s a different kind of intensity: life in close-up with never-ending shrieking sirens, blaring horns, pavements jam-packed with pedestrians.

Returning to New York t’s nice to forget about driving and just walk or hail a cab and find it actually stops. Energy hums from every street corner, bar, subway station, park. You can’t help but soak it up. Maybe I could catch the bicoastal bug.

Where Are They Now?

This week, Enron's Andy Fastow was sentenced and WorldCom's Bernie Ebbers reported to jail. Here's our up-to-date tally of what happened to executives at five of the most infamous financial frauds in Corporate America.

The outcome of five major financial-fraud trials
Company	Status	Prison Sentence
WorldCom
Bernard Ebbers, former CEO	Guilty verdict	25 years
Scott Sullivan, former CFO	Pleaded guilty	5 years
David Myers, former controller	Pleaded guilty	1 year, 1 day
Buford Yates, former accounting director	Pleaded guilty	1 year, 1 day
Enron
Kenneth Lay, former chairman	Guilty verdict	Deceased
Jeffrey Skilling, former CEO	Guilty verdict	Due to be sentenced 10/23
Andrew Fastow, former CFO	Pleaded guilty	6 years
Lea Fastow, former treasurer	Pleaded guilty	1 year
Michael Kopper, former managing director	Pleaded guilty	Due to be sentenced 11/03
Adelphia
John J. Rigas, founder	Guilty verdict	15 years
Timothy Rigas, former CFO	Guilty verdict	20 years
Michael Rigas, former executive VP	Not guilty*	—
James R. Brown, former vice president	Pleaded guilty	Awaiting sentencing
Michael C. Mulcahey, former assistant treasurer	Acquitted	—
Tyco
Dennis Kozlowski, former CEO	Guilty verdict	8 to 25 years
Mark Swartz, former CFO	Guilty verdict	8 to 25 years
Mark Belnick, former general counsel	Acquitted	—
HealthSouth
Richard Scrushy, former CEO	Acquitted	—
Malcolm McVay, former CFO	Pleaded guilty	7 days**
Weston Smith, former CFO	Pleaded guilty	2 years, 2 days
William T. Owens, former CFO	Pleaded guilty	5 years
Michael Martin, former CFO	Pleaded guilty	3 years
Aaron Beam Jr., former CFO	Pleaded guilty	3 months
Emery Harris, former assistant controller	Pleaded guilty	5 months
*Found not guilty of conspiracy and wire fraud. Will be retried on 15 other charges. **Sentence has been appealed by the federal government and is under review.

Teens: E-mail is for old people

Is e-mail only for the old? That's the contention of a string of articles published in the last four months, the most recent appearing today in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The Chronicle says that in a study last ygers preferred new technology, like instant messaging or text messaging, for talking to friendear, "teenas and use e-mail to communicate with 'old people.'" The Mercury News says, "For those of you who have just figured out how to zap spam or manage your inbox, prepare for the bad news: E-mail is, like, so yesterday." And then there's USA Today, which makes the claim that "E-mail is so last millennium."

Those are pretty dramatic statements, and they're based in part on last year's Pew Internet & American life study on teen Internet habits. 87 percent of teenagers in the US now use the Internet, and many of them prefer instant messaging to e-mail. According the report, "Teens who participated in focus groups for this study said that they view e-mail as something you use to talk to 'old people,' institutions, or to send complex instructions to large groups. When it comes to casual written conversation, particularly when talking with friends, online instant messaging is the clearly the mode of choice for today's online teens."

This is a problem for institutions that use e-mail as an official communications tool, since students often miss announcements or deadlines. Unfortunately, IM isn't great for sending out reminders with lots of specifics, such as instructions for registration. What's a college to do?

For some schools, the correct answer is: set up a MySpace page. After all, there's nothing hipper for students than being "friends" with your college registrar or school principal. The intriguing thing about this method of reaching students is that it's most often not "instant" at all; students receive messages when they log in or they visit the school's MySpace pages—the equivalent of using e-mail and a Web portal.

E-mail isn't dying, but it's grown a little sick. comScore Media Metrix found that in April 2006, teen e-mail use was down 8 percent from a year before. Teens are using IM and MySpace for communication with friends, but they haven't abandoned the tool—that's why 89 percent of teens who use the Internet still use e-mail, while only 75 percent use instant messaging.

But they have learned its limitations. One of those limitations is the staggering volume of spam that clogs most inboxes and the aggressive spam filters that make it impossible to know if any particular message got through.

And for those worried that we are raising a generation of children who develop friendships only by staring at their monitors, the Pew report also contains an encouraging word. Teenagers till spend more time interacting face-to-face with friends than they do using technology.

The future of Europe's military

I thought I would recommend, strongly, a read of a bleak, but fascinating new policy paper on the future of the European military.

Britain is balancing between the EU and Nato

The thing is the work of a newish defence procurement agency for the EU – the European Defence Agency – and you may be less than surprised to learn that having decided the future looks very bleak, the EDA’s solution is lots of harmonised defence procurement and research spending, to be channeled through the, um, EDA.

Leaving aside that fairly typical piece of Brussels self-actualisation (to use the psychiatrists’ term), the paper itself is amazingly blunt about how weak Europe may be in the future.

Its most dramatic prediction is that traditional ideas of “victory” have to be jettisoned in favour of limited, multi-national campaigns to restore “stability” to conflict zones, with the grudging consent of an ageing, ever more casualty-averse European population.

The paper, entitled: “An Initial Long-Term Vision for European Defence Capability and Capacity Needs”, paints a vision of Europe in 20 years time, in which plunging fertility rates leave militaries struggling to recruit young men and women of fighting age, at a time when national budgets will be under unprecedented strain to pay for greying populations.

At the same time, increasingly cautious voters and politicians may be unwilling to contemplate casualties, or “potentially controversial interventions abroad - in particular interventions in regions from where large numbers of immigrants have come.”

Voters will also be insistent on having UN backing for operations, and on crafting large coalitions of EU member states with a heavy involvement of civilian agencies, and not just fighting units, the paper suggests. They will also want military operations to be environmentally friendly, where possible.

All these changes may drive a wedge between the United States and Europe, creating a “characteristically European approach”, which is “different in ambition and character” from a US vision of war-fighting, with for example, a stronger emphasis on “civil-military interoperability”.

This European approach can be “nested within NATO conceptual frameworks and standards”, the paper says, in a nod to the trans-Atlantic alliance which has underpinned European security for decades.

The tone could not be more different from the Bush administration’s talk of fighting for victory in a global war on terror. The paper predicts future European defence and security operations “will be expeditionary, multinational and multi-dimensional, directed at achieving security and stability more than “victory”.”

It gives warning that militaries will have to cope, even more than today, with round the clock media attention.

“In the conduct of war, ever greater attention will be paid to proportion and justification in the application of force, with an increasing tendency to hold individuals responsible for their actions not just at head of state or military commander level but down the command chain. Attention to collateral damage will be ever more acute,” it says.

The paper was drawn up at the invitation of ministers by the EDA, an EU body which exists to push for more common spending and research by different EU defence ministries and industries. Accordingly, the paper’s favoured solution is steady harmonisation of European militaries, ideally using the same equipment, and using intelligence from pooled spy agencies.

“The best form of interoperability for equipments and systems is commonality – using the same kit. This operational perspective matches the defence economic imperative to consolidate the demand side of the European defence equipment market,” the paper says.

It calls for radical cuts to the standing armies of Europe, which currently number two million men and women, though a far smaller number of combat troops. “Approaches include out-sourcing; increased automation (from warships to robots); and reducing superfluous capability (do Europeans between them really need nearly 10.000 main battle tanks, and nearly 3.000 combat aircraft?).”

The overwhelming tone is unremittingly bleak. “The global context is sobering,” it says, predicting a future of demographic and economic decline for Europe, in which EU citizens will have an average age of 45, and will find themselves utterly dependent on the outside world for energy. At the same time, the populations of Africa and the Middle East will be young, crowded into ever larger cities, and bitterly aware of their exclusion from the fruits of globalisation.

America may lose interest in Europe, as well, the paper predicts. “Relatively poorer, older, and more anxious about its security, Europe may also find itself increasingly alone in confronting the problems of a difficult neighbourhood, as the focus of US foreign policy, following economic and geopolitical developments, shifts towards Asia.”

The paper was presented at an informal meeting in Lapland, hosted by Finland, holder of the EU rotating presidency. Ministers endorsed it, but that does not mean they sign up to everything in it. Here is a press release on the ministerial meeting.

Does Britain sign up to this kind of thing? Well, we are happy, I am told, maintaining a balancing act between the EU and the US-led world of Nato. It is too crude a generalization to say Nato is for the wars where people need bombing, and the EU is for the cuddly, hearts and minds stuff, but not by much.

In more formal terms, a Ministry of Defence spokesman told me about the paper: “We see this as a pragmatic view of the future, and an important part of a long term strategic planning process. The UK is comfortable with our position of working with both Nato and the EU.”

Greasing of Wheels Halts LA Traffic

Well, as if we didn't have enough to be pissed at President Bush for, we come to find him responsible for the hours-long traffic nightmare that's virtually shut down the Westside this evening.

Yes, the most unpopular president since Herbert Hoover, who's treated California as virtually a foreign country for the past six years, came to town to get a little grease poured on his wheels by a few wealthy constituents (the fundraising dinner being at the house of venture capitalist Elliott Broidy, appointed early this year to Homeland Security's Advisory Council).

Broidy's house being in Holmby Hills, naturally the entire 405 is shut down in rolling strips this evening, in both directions, while Sunset Blvd. is completely closed from 4-8 PM from Westwood to the freeway. So as hundreds of thousands sit in gridlock, burning precious gasoline at $3.00 per gallon, it's worth remembering who really owns this country.

We'll breathe a lot easier when the ape has taken his circus and left town. And so will the Governator, who's been running from the freakshow all day.