Word: britishisms
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Earlier this year, the British government hired management-consulting firm McKinsey & Co. to suggest ways the country's National Health Service (NHS) might save money in the face of rising health-care costs. But when a portion of McKinsey's confidential work calling for a 10% cut in the NHS workforce was leaked to the British press last week, politicians rushed to the airwaves to reject the report they themselves had commissioned. "That's not what we are about," Minister of Health Mike O'Brien told the BBC. "In core frontline services, we need more staff rather than fewer...
...minute movie - which was co-written by the British-Pakistani commentator Tariq Ali, author of the 2006 study Pirates of the Caribbean: Axis of Hope, and photographed in part by docu-doyen Albert Maysles - is amateur night as cinema, as lopsided and cheerleadery as its worldview. U.S. foreign policy, Stone asserts, divides South American nations into "friends, whose leaders do what we tell them to do, and enemies, whose leaders occasionally disagree with us." His film is no more nuanced. He sees the geopolitical glass as all empty (the U.S. and its world-banking arm, the International Monetary Fund...
Afghanistan is replete with grim reminders for those who would wish to rule it. The British were having a marvelous time in Kabul back in 1841: horse races, picnics, amateur theatrics (something British expats indulge in wherever they go) and lot of good grog and food. Meanwhile, the Afghans were seething over these madcap Victorians. (See pictures of election day in Afghanistan...
...embassy or the Afghan ministries where the bombs also tend to go off. And so much for picnics and exploring the countryside: many of the roads out of Kabul are no longer safe for foreigners. That includes the one snaking down into the Kabul Gorge where the British were massacred. More surprising, it also includes the main Kabul-Kandahar highway, which was supposed to be a symbol to Afghans of the benefits of an American-backed government. If you're a foreigner or a rich Afghan, you can fly to Kandahar. Otherwise, ordinary Afghans have to take their chances with...
This is heady stuff. (Imagine a putative British prime minister talking openly about American decline and looking forward to Russia's membership in the EU.) It is all enough to make one wonder how well-founded the U.S.-Japan relationship really is, and how resilient to a changing global environment it is likely...