Buffer force

It seems the latest idea for dealing with the situation in Lebanon is some sort of international force to do something in the south of the country. If I read code words like "robust" correctly the purpose is essentially to destroy Hezbollah and act as frontier guards for Israel. No doubt it will be sold to as a "peacekeeping force" for, presumably, the same value of "peace" that prevails in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The whole idea seems immensely problematic. No-one in the Islamic world (including most of the population of southern Lebanon) is going to buy this as anything other than an armed intervention in favour of Israel. It therefore seems reasonable to assume that any troops deployed will come under the same sort of attack as in Afghanistan and Iraq which isn't a particularly appealing prospect.

There is a major problem about where the troops might come from and under what command structure. The US (and presumably Israel) don't want a 'blue helmeted' force and the optics of a NATO led mission would be almost as bad as an American led one. Looking around too it's hard to see where the troops would come from. Americans and Brits are right out for obvious reasons. The Canadians and Australians are stretched way too thin already. Of the armed forces capable of deploying for such a mission and not guaranteed to make a complete balls of it that would appear to leave France, Germany, Sweden, Turkey, India and Japan. For various reasons it seems highly improbable that Sweden, Germany or Japan would be prepared to make more than a token commitment, if that. I guess the best bet, if there has to be an intervention force, would be a Franco-Turkish one, though how 'neutral' the Israelis would consider the French to be might pose issues. Ironically, the French would probably deploy the Legion for such a task which would result in a largely German force protecting Israel.

Looking at it more broadly, am I the only one who is concerned that the current reaction to any hot spot (or at least one where sufficiently white people are getting killed) is to send a polyglot expedition with weird command structures and an unclear mission? At least Palmerston had some idea of what he expected a gunboat to do.

Pleasant again

It was 20C and 73%RH when I ran this morning and it felt very, very pleasant. It actually dropped to an icy 15C last night. Anyway, I took advantage of the relative cool to do a reasonably energetic 3.5km or so. I'm slowly getting my running fitness back and the shoulder continues to improve. I've upped the hand weights to 7 pounds and I'm using the silver theraband for the resistive exercises. I've also been swimming most days and I can do front and back crawl now without too much problem. I still don't have much muscle stamina in the shoulders though. They are pretty much done after about ten minutes swimming.

Thomas Hardy VC indeed!

coughingbear drew attention to this article in the Grauniad which manages to claim that Captain Thomas Hardy won the Victoria Cross at Trafalgar. I'm curious and mean so I did some digging and found this surprisingly similar story in the Sydney Morning Herald which looks very much like the Guardian story with the crucial difference that it refers to "a medal" not a VC, won by Hardy at Trafalgar. So, it looks like The Guardian has plagiarised a story from the SMH without attribution and then in trying to gussy it up a bit has committed a howler. Truly with the ghosts of Scott and Cardus I cry "O tempora, O mores" and this in the week of the Old Trafford test.

Bits and pieces

lemur_catta and I aren't the tidiest or most organised couple so sometimes things end up in odd juxtapositions. Today I tried to capture some of the middle ground between the zones of tidiness (vanishingly rare) and just plain squalid. Needless to say the cats decided to help.

( To the gallery... )

Missing picture

I can't believe I forgot this one. It was what sparked the whole idea.



Hello Proust!

Vox???

So what is the point of Vox? It's another blog brand from SixApart so if you are of the "SixApart are clueless corporate morons" school it doesn't get you out of their clutches. If you like SixApart or are at least prepared to do the clothes peg thing what advantage does Vox offer over their other four blog brands including LJ? Looks to me like "Coke with only 2/5 the calories and 1/4 the caffeine", aka meaningless line extension.

I wouldn't disavow this

You scored as Existentialist. Existentialism emphasizes human capability. There is no greater power interfering with life and thus it is up to us to make things happen. Sometimes considered a negative and depressing world view, your optimism towards human accomplishment is immense. Mankind is condemned to be free and must accept the responsibility. </td> Existentialist 88% Modernist 63% Cultural Creative 56% Materialist 50% Postmodernist 44% Romanticist 25% Idealist 25% Fundamentalist 6% What is Your World View? created with QuizFarm.com