in·ter·mit·tent
in·ter·mit·tent
Pronunciation: \-ˈmi-tənt\
Function: adjective
Etymology: Latin intermittent-, intermittens, present participle of intermittere
Date: 1601
: coming and going at intervals : not continuous
; also : occasional
—
in·ter·mit·tent·ly adverb
Source: Mirriam-Webster Online Dictionary
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Intermittent
Retrieved 2 December 2010
In this post-exam, pre-holiday period I'm going to take a break from this blog. If I run into something stupendous, I'll post it here, but mostly you're on your own for a few days.
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More leaks in the oil pipeline
It may be that losses of valuable resources begin before the well-known corruption even starts. (From
Leadership in Abuja.)
Country Lost Over U.S. $7 Billion to Oil Theft in One Year - Alison-Madueke
Minister of Petroleum Resources, Mrs. Diezani Alison-Madueke, has disclosed that while huge amount of dollars has been [spent] in the last one year on pipeline repairs, a record volume of crude valued at $7billion has been lost to crude theft via illegal bunkering within the same period…
The Team which was created at the end of a round table on the Nigerian Oil and Gas Industry convened by the Minister of Petroleum Resources is made up of personnel from the oil industry and the Military as well as the Police Force...
The minister, in a statement issued yesterday, decried the menace of oil theft, said the new understanding will strengthen partnership with leadership of security agencies in curbing the problem…
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Labels: corruption, Nigeria, political culture
Factional conflicts in Iran
China is not the only place where factions within a seemingly unified elite are competing with one another.
Iran’s tough nuclear stance masks struggles at top
The negotiating stance from Iranian officials never varies: The Islamic Republic will not give up its capabilities to make nuclear fuel. But embedded in the messages are meanings that reach beyond Tehran’s talks with world powers.
It points to the struggles within Iran’s ruling system as it readies for the next round of talks…
Iran’s Islamic leadership… has now staked its political credibility on its ability to resist Western sanctions and hold firm to its rights under U.N. treaties to enrich uranium.
Any concessions -- either too great or too fast -- could risk internal rifts within Iran’s power structure. And that could draw powerful forces into the mix, including the Revolutionary Guard that acts as defender of the theocracy and overseer of the nuclear program. As talks deepen, so do the political considerations for an Islamic establishment that cannot afford to appear to come away empty handed…
This is the tricky ground being navigated by Iran.
Its leaders are desperate to avoid any impression of caving under the Western economic squeeze. Any serious rollbacks -- without Western concessions in return -- could open room for hard-liners to take pot shots at the ruling clerics. It also could put the Revolutionary Guard in the awkward position of defending the Islamic system against ultra-nationalists who normally side with the Guard…
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Labels: Iran, politics
Heaven is high; the emperor is far away
Should this example put to rest the notion that the Chinese system is totalitarian? Is the old proverb more accurate?
China’s Obsession With Stability Can Come at the Cost of Laws
China’s central government says that the activist lawyer Chen Guangcheng is a free man, and has promised him an investigation of the harrowing abuses he suffered at the hands of guards here. Mr. Chen’s desperate escape last month from persecution to American protection has embarrassed China’s leaders and cast new shadows on their commitment to the rule of law.
But a visit to this municipality in eastern China, where Mr. Chen and his family most recently spent 20 months as prisoners in their own home, offers no hint of a change in the way China deals with its dissidents.
Journalists who sought on Sunday to talk to residents a few hundred yards from Dongshigu, the village in Linyi where Mr. Chen was held captive, were quickly escorted out by thugs in four automobiles, and later were accosted in a burst of arm-wrenching and name-calling.
Members of the same gang still keep Mr. Chen’s mother incommunicado and under siege here. Mr. Chen’s nephew faces a charge of attempted murder after he slashed a knife at plainclothes officers who invaded his home and beat him. Lawyers seeking to defend the nephew have been ordered to drop the case or face retribution.
There is no evidence that the central government in Beijing ordered this harassment, all of which is illegal under Chinese law. But neither is there any indication that Beijing wants it to stop.
To the contrary, both rights activists and legal experts say, the system for dealing with dissidents and other troublemakers is geared toward allowing local leaders to ignore the law, with Beijing’s sometimes silent assent. Indeed, the central government may even reward local leaders for doing so. The reason is that their Communist Party careers depend on meeting a series of performance goals — from high economic growth to low levels of public unrest — whose importance far outweigh any gold stars awarded for following the law.
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Labels: capacity, China, politics
Is Lords' reform just a political boondoggle?
The Economist offers an op-ed on the reform of the UK's upper chamber
House repairs: Beneath high-flown talk of Lords reform lies a grubby power struggle
Lords reform sounds an abstruse subject to outsiders, on a par with the gilded and berobed flummery of the State Opening itself. Research by YouGov, a pollster, suggests it is a political priority for precisely no voters (though if prompted, most people prefer the sound of an elected upper house)…
Thanks to pressure from Liberal Democrats, for whom constitutional reform is a defining concern, legislation to reform the Lords should reach Parliament within weeks…
Opponents, including many Tory MPs and peers but also members of Labour and even a few Lib Dems, charge that an upper house with its own electoral mandate would threaten “the destruction of the House of Commons as we know it”, to quote one Conservative peer…
As it happens, there are questions of real principle to consider. If current proposals are followed, the Senate would be only tenuously accountable to voters, with members elected from giant constituencies for 15-year terms by a variant of proportional representation. Yet even such arms-length democracy would test the century-old convention that in tussles with the House of Commons…
So much for high principle. In private, peers, MPs and officials describe a debate steeped in self-interest and cant. Naturally lots of MPs want to keep an appointed House of Lords, growls a senior Lib Dem: it’s where they plan to retire, or flee after losing seats…
Of course Lib Dems want a proportionally elected Senate, counter Tory and Labour politicians: they think they would hold the balance of power there.
In short, the airy debate over Lords reform is really a brutal fight about power. Which is why a Senate will probably not happen…
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Labels: change, legislature, politics, regime, UK
Islam 101
One of the keys to understanding Iranian political culture is understanding Islam. This might come a little late this school year, but I'd want to have this next time I taught about Iran.
Sunni-Shia strife: The sword and the word
IT SEEMED historic. Muslim scholars, 170 in number and representing nine schools of legal thought (including four main Sunni ones and two Shia), gathered in Amman and declared that, whatever their differences, they accepted the others’ authority over their respective flocks. Implicitly, at least, they were renouncing the idea that their counterparts were heretics…
But seen from the outside, feuds between Sunnis, who make up roughly 80% of the world’s Muslims, and the Shia minority (most of the rest), remain savage and are, in some ways, worsening.
In conservative Sunni monarchies (especially those with restless Shia populations) dislike and suspicion of Iran, the Shia bastion, is running higher than ever. Theology intertwines with geopolitics—and an incipient strategic-arms race. Far beyond the Gulf or Middle East, from western Europe to North America, Sunni agitation (often Saudi-sponsored) is intensifying against the supposed heresies contained in Shia teaching…
European Shia-Sunni acrimony is part of a many-sided contest over the future of the continent’s tens of millions of Muslims, says Jonathan Laurence, a scholar at Boston College. The religious authorities in migrant-sending countries like Turkey and Morocco struggle to keep their people loyal to their own varieties of Sunni practice: they see Shia Islam and hardline Sunni groups like the Salafists as equally dangerous and insidious temptations for their sons and daughters in Europe…
Click on the chart or go to The Economist article to read the chart.
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Labels: concepts, history, Iran, political culture
Mid-term check up
Are the strains of coalition threatening the partnership government?
I never promised you a rose garden
TWO years ago Britain’s first peacetime coalition government since the 1930s set out to prune the state. Defying the long trend in which power was centralised in Westminster, it sought to push it out to cities, towns, schools and doctors. It moved to shake up public services by encouraging firms and non-profit groups to compete for tasks generally done by the state. Schools, local government, policing, health, planning, welfare, justice—almost every arm of the state was to be transformed. All this as the government cut spending more deeply than any since the second world war.
The coalition faced a dilemma in its Queen’s Speech on May 9th… The government plans lots of incremental changes: loosening labour regulation, tightening public-sector pensions, and establishing a new agency to fight organised crime and strengthen border security. As for making the House of Lords more democratic—a key Liberal Democrat demand that many Conservatives oppose—a bill has made it into the government’s agenda, but it is unclear how much priority it will have…
The government’s mission to trim the state and deliver more cost-effective and innovative public services… has run into problems. After two years in power, the coalition has chalked up a few clear successes. But the list of failures is growing, and so is the general sense of drift…
The coalition’s greatest achievement has been to set the country on the course of deficit reduction. It has raised taxes and curbed public spending…
Until recently the clearest failure seemed to be health care. The government’s attempt to decentralise and diversify the National Health Service by making local doctors more accountable for the money they spend and opening the door to private practitioners has been botched…
The attempt to devolve power to cities is another failure… On May 3rd the government held referendums in ten of England’s biggest cities, asking people if they wanted elected mayors. Voters in all but one—Bristol—said no…
Welfare reform also illustrates a big problem with the government’s programme: the lack of money to lubricate changes…
Some reforms are simply evolving, in ways that make early pledges seem silly. One of the Conservative Party’s early ideas was to create a flourishing “Big Society” composed of voluntary and local groups doing tasks once monopolised by the state… The Big Society has given way to big business—no bad thing, but a departure from the blueprint. Meanwhile contradictions are emerging, between both policies and politicians…
Most seriously, there are growing doubts about the government’s basic competence. Mr Cameron rightly deplored the micromanaging style of his predecessor, Gordon Brown. But he may have veered to the opposite extreme with a magisterially hands-off approach. Whereas Labour made Downing Street an unofficial “Department of the Prime Minister”, with battalions of political advisers helping the government impose itself on wayward departments and recalcitrant civil servants, Mr Cameron undid much of that. Insiders increasingly concede that Downing Street now lacks “grip” on the rest of government…
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Labels: policy, politics, UK
