Today’s quote is from the Christian Science Monitor, which gives a revealing look into the reasons why Africa refuses to reign in Mugabe. This is a matter close to my heart, since I have family in Zimbabwe, and am well aware of the crisis that faces the people in the country.

At any rate, most South Africans look at Mbeki’s so called “Quiet Diplomacy” (or “softly, slowly” approach) in relation to Zimbabwe, and scratch their heads in disbelief: matters have progressively gotten worse with censorship of the press, human-rights abuses and land evictions, intimidation, beatings, a crumbling economy with ever increasing inflation, poverty and unemployment.

And yet, Mbeki has constantly argued for many years, “Together with [Zimbabweans], our government will work persistently and without making the noise of empty drums, to help the sister people of Zimbabwe to find a just and lasting solution to the real and pressing land question in their country.” SA’s Foreign Minister Dlamini Zuma’s elaborated that SA would “never” condemn Zimbabwe “as long as this government is in power” because they didn’t want to “throw [the Zimbabwean] people over the precipice”, despite the evidence that they already are being pushed over it by their own government.

Yet this is not the real reason behind Mbeki’s softly, slowly approach. No, Mbeki was in fact much clearer about it at a March 28 South African Development Community conference in Tanzania, as quoted in the Christian Science Monitor article:

“The fight against Zimbabwe is a fight against us all. Today it is Zimbabwe; tomorrow it will be South Africa, it will be Mozambique, it will be Angola, it will be any other African country. And any government that is perceived to be strong and to be resistant to imperialists would be made a target and would be undermined. So let us not allow any point of weakness in the solidarity of SADC, because that weakness will also be transferred to the rest of Africa.”

Therefore, the real meaning of quiet diplomacy is essentially to support Zimbabwe, which “is perceived to be strong”, through thick and thin because it has been “made a target” by “imperialists”, and the SADC must not show “weakness”.

This is similar to the slogan, “My Country, Right Or Wrong”, and it is likely to have the same disastrous consequences of allowing a thug and a tyrant to stay in power.

Ever wonder what you’re really drinking when you pick up that bottled water? And I don’t just mean what’s in the water: where’s it come from? What’s its impact? What’s its future? These questions have been bugging me, so I set out to discover the answers. Turns out, there’s a lot of reasons why you shouldn’t buy bottled water any more. So, here’s the seven deadly sins of bottled water.

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Today’s quote comes from the UK Ministry of Defence’s Development Concepts and Doctrine Centre, which recently published a report entitled Global Strategic Trends 2007-2036. The report’s purpose is to analyse a wide range of potential outcomes over the next thirty years, ranging from the impact of globalization, inequality, and poverty, to terrorism, climate change, and future technologies and weapons. There are several fantastic quotes scattered throughout the document, but one of the more interesting ones is this:

The middle classes could become a revolutionary class, taking the role envisaged for the proletariat by Marx. The globalization of labour markets and reducing levels of national welfare provision and employment could reduce peoplesâ?? attachment to particular states. The growing gap between themselves and a small number of highly visible super-rich individuals might fuel disillusion with meritocracy, while the growing urban under-classes are likely to pose an increasing threat to social order and stability, as the burden of acquired debt and the failure of pension provision begins to bite. Faced by these twin challenges, the worldâ??s middle-classes might unite, using access to knowledge, resources and skills to shape transnational processes in their own class interest.

I find that particularly fascinating (and promising, in fact). I’ve always found Marx’s works to be interesting and still relevant in today’s society, especially in the fields of sociology and political economy, despite some of my friends still having a chuckle and saying that he has absolutely no relevance in today’s world. In fact, one of the first lines of an economics text I read a while ago said that, with the fall of the Soviet Union, Marx was proved “wrong”, never mind that since the earliest days of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 it was recognised amongst the Left and others that Lenin’s revolution bore no resemblance to Marx’s ideas. At any rate, it seems he may have relevance in tomorrow’s world.

On a related note, this document ties in nicely with another paper I’ve started reading from the Oxford Research Group entitled Global Responses to Global Threats: Sustainable Security for the 21st Century, which argues “that international terrorism is actually a relatively minor threat when compared to other more serious global trends”, such as climate change and resource competition.

(And if you want a summarised version of the Global Strategic Trends report, the Guardian have done an article on it).

Business Week are running a piece on motion capture technology, saying that it is transforming the way companies do business, as well as advertise. From the article:

Motion capture is starting to transform how businesses market their products as well as design and manufacture them. This spring the Las Vegas McCarren International Airport will set up large plasma screens with a motion- tracking component that lets advertisers bring pedestrians into their commercials. When you walk past a car ad, for example, the vehicle might move at the same speed you’re walking. When you turn to look at the driver, he’ll turn to look at you, and you’ll be staring into an image of your own face. Dozens of blue-chip aerospace, auto, and heavy-equipment makers, from Lockheed Martin to BMW to Caterpillar already use motion tracking to let workers collaborate in shared virtual environments, sometimes when they are thousands of miles apart. Together they can test the ergonomics of a design for a car or a plane. “Any company that creates a product used by people needs to understand how the human body moves,” says Iek van Cruyningen, head of securities at Libertas Capital Group, a specialist investment bank. “Motion-tracking systems and virtual simulations accelerate product development and boost productivity.”

Some interesting questions arise from all this, all of them to do with privacy (aside from the fact that most billboards are just damn ugly monstrosities invading our personal space). What if I don’t consent to having my face and body displayed on a massive billboard or an advert? Whose permission do they ask for in order to film me? How do I opt out so that any possible cameras they’re using don’t film me? How long before ubiquitous advertising such as this essentially becomes out-sourced surveillance for the city’s/country’s law enforcement?

I’m pretty sure that Second Life - or, at least, a business in Second Life - must be looking at this and thinking, “Wouldn’t it be cool to have a motion capture system that overlaid our real world store into the virtual world?” Tie that in with arphid store-loyalty cards, and you’ve got a perfect real-world simulation of your store and everyone in it.

Pretty much what I had pictured before. Yeah, pretty cool. Too bad it’ll be used to just track everything you do.

I’m also curious as to how long it’ll be before ad busters and culture jammers start hacking into these 21st Century billboards to replace them with their own. Looking forward to that one.

Keeping in mind that realism as a political school only appeared when first used by the international relations theorists E. H. Carr and Hans J. Morgenthau, the basic principles have a rich history. One of the most common historical examples of this tradition is the Ancient Greek historian Thucydides and his History of the Peloponnesian Wars, dating back more than 2400 years.

In a nutshell, Realism is considered to be a set of laws for elites that span both time and space i.e. history and geopolitics. Those laws have common strands threading throughout history. Of course, there are a wide variety of different schools within realism (far too many to cover here) but all of them contain some basic principles.

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Today’s word is “Biopower” (also sometimes referred to as bio-techno-power), first used by French philosopher Michel Foucault to describe how a state controls its citizens, not through negative means (such as the threat of death or physical coercion), but through more positive means such as by promoting a better life, namely by emphasising the protection of life. As the word implies with “bio”, it has a specific biological aspect to it.

According to Foucault, biopower is how capitalist and democratic societies controlled their citizens, and it was “an indispensible element” for the “development of capitalism” because it helped adjust “the phenomena of population to economic processes”.

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Today’s quote comes from Bernard Meunier, Nestlé’s country manager, quoted in Business Week (2006) on why they’ve “pumped $500 million into Russia to date”:

“As soon as people step out of poverty, they become potential Nestlé customers.”

I suppose that’s really good news for Russia’s 53 billionaires, but probably bad news for the 20% that live below the poverty line, and the 30% whose wages are below the required minimum to live. It seems that the poorest segments of the population, like pensioners, the unemployed and government employees like teachers are not likely to be Nestlé customers.

(There is of course the exception to the rule, and that’s probably when they want to give free breast milk substitutes that helps contribute to the problem of 1.5 million children dying every year from inadequate breast feeding).

Great article on BBC’s “Our Correspondent” website covering a recent US conference trying to see whether there was still anything in common with Europe. Apparently not:

“The West is an outdated concept,” declared one supremely self-confident senior American official at a lunch where he was the guest of honour. “And if there is still a West, then it includes Australia, Japan and South Korea. We have a global vision now” […] Seen through American eyes, it seemed the era of fixed alliances was over.

[…]

The name of the game would be selective and loose commitments: “Like an open marriage,” said one former US official […] “In my experience an open marriage tends to work only for one side,” [said] a British academic, “and I suspect it is the Americans who will benefit.”

When all’s said and done, there’s no real change in outlook. You’re still either with US, or against US.

Ever wonder how all the money pumped into fighting the War on Drugs is used? Well, here’s one indication from the Associated Press:

The U.N. found that Colombia’s army - the largest recipient of $700 million in annual anti-narcotics and counterinsurgency aid from the United States - had participated in killing civilians in 21 of Colombia’s 32 states.

The U.N. said the numbers of civilian killed in those areas showed an increase over 2005 but did not provide death toll figures.

In many cases, the victims were falsely presented as leftist rebels killed in combat, crime scene evidence was tampered with and the investigation was led by the military’s questioned criminal justice system.

The report said such killings with “characteristics of extrajudicial executions do not appear to be isolated incidents” and may have been prompted partly by the government’s use of combat deaths as a benchmark to measure success against leftist insurgents.

But there is some good news out of all this. The UK is probably making a decent amount of money selling arms to Columbia, after having identified it as one of a few “priority” markets for arms sales.

You can tell a lot from someone’s bookshelf. In fact, when I go to someone’s house for the first time (and if they don’t mind) I always make a point of looking to see what books they have. So it was with interest that I had a read through Jim Lobe’s recent piece on Bush’s reading list. Most of the books mentioned seem to conform to a general pattern of strengthening Bush’s world-view: right-wing and neo-conservative with a dose of Islamophobism thrown in for good measure. Of course, Lobe wouldn’t be able to name every book on Bush’s shelf, but it would be nice to know that he owns one or two that challenged his world-view instead of strengthening it, all things considered.