Between the realm of the failed state and the functioning, if not always healthy, nation, there lies the semi-state. A semi-state can be defined as a state which does not reach its internationally recognized borders. Within its control it fulfills the basic requirement being the fact on the ground, however, there are significant regions which would have been called "palitinates" in English legal theory circa 1400 - that is, regions were "the king's writ doth not hold". In our post-feudal world, the easy acceptance of this idea is harder to come by, and yet there are a number of states that have come to a relative stablity as semi states: Zaire, Columbia, Pakistan - states with organized counter-government apparatus that have effective control of territory, and some degree of recognition from the "central government".

It works, if you don't mind the wastage of human life.

First Russia announces that it will sell air-defense systems to Syria. Iran and Syria announce a united front. Then Russia now announces that it does not believe that Iran is developing a weapons program. This is a tacit signal that Russia will oppose any UN council sanctions against Iran.

One number is seldom decisive in economics, one month's data means little, particularly with volatile indicators such as the producer price index. The volatility of PPI is, in fact, a more interesting number than the PPI itself is on many occasions: the increased volatility of the Producer Price Index in the late 1990's predicted the end of the Great Commodities Depression, and the problems with resource inflation we have faced since then. So far these problems have been pinches, less significant to the overall economy that incompetent fiscal policy and monetary policy that has been so accomodative that it makes a serious case for the use of the word "slut" with regard to the Federal Reserve.

What the data do indicate is that the comploria - complacency that resemble euphoria - that hangs over much of Wall Street and Main Street is beginning to be discomforted.

Right after the Negroponte announcement, CNN's Live Today got Adm. Stansfield Turner on the phone. (I always thought that Turner, DCI under Jimmy Carter, was the most trustworthy of the breed. It's gotta be the name. It exudes upright.)

Will Negroponte have the resources and the backing to do the job? Says Turner, there's too much ambiguity in the law, and the DoD is running too hard to protect its turf. ("Mr. Rumsfeld and the Defense Department would just go ape if you tried to take those [the NSA and other intelligence collection entities] away from them." I love "go ape" from the mouth of Adm. Turner. It layers a certain raffishness onto the sturdy, straight-shooting demeanor.) Unless Bush gives Negroponte's CEO role his full and absolute support (not a certain thing, Turner says, considering how tight Bush is with the DoD), it's going to be tough for him to do the job.

The old male stands massive in the middle of the circling wolves. Blood stains his teeth, and under one massive paw a victim writhes. The old alpha is huge still, but his tendons stand out in clear relief, his limbs tremble and his eyes are mad with pain and rage. Old, weakened, he is still a dangerous foe, but his day as leader of the pack will soon be done.

And the other wolves smell blood.

It is the end of empire. The end of not just the Pax Americana – but the end of a dominion stretching from 1812 to the modern day – the Anglo American era. Oh, there were challengers, but for two centuries one of those two nations stood astride the world, a colossus.

From Instapundit comes a post that is not condescending at all.

STAY-AT-HOME DAD JAMES LILEKS Fisks the Newsweek story on stay-at-home moms:

When it comes to expectations about gender and roles and accomplishments and the latest theories about childrearing, I have a secret mantra:

I don’t care.

I know, I know. Easy for me to say. But shout it out loud! I DON'T CARE! Feels good, no? Now meet my hero. Don’t miss the last line. They don’t get it. Even if they ordered it and put it on their platinum Amex, they wouldn’t know where to have it delivered.

You know, in retrospect, I wonder if some will think this is somehow anti-women. Can't help that. But the entire article seems anti-women, to me. I live in a world of moms, and their sense of ingenuity and amusement are a constant source of delight.

Read the whole thing.

Delight! Ahh.

Every time there's even the hint of a scandal, they attach the word -gate to it. See, for e.g.: Filegate, Memogate, Bustergate, etc.

We need to start adding -gate ourselves. Torturememogate. Delaygate. NoWMDgate. Gannongate. We could call that one maleprostituteinthewhitehousegate. And in case you're wondering, I am not joking.

The killing of Rafiq al-Hariri has occasioned withdrawing the US ambassador to Syria. To put this in perspective, in the language of diplomacy, the only greater rebuke would withdrawing the mission itself. It's a strong statement. Lebanese groups have clearly decided to blame Syria and so has France.

I am hearing echos of a dream, the fear of a stock market swan dive that will come with the next recession. It comes from people worried about the yield curve. Why is the yield curve such an accurate indicator of a recession?

It goes back to the work of John Kenneth Galbraith.

Jerry Brown, former governor of California, current mayor of Oakland, and future candidate for the office of CA Attorney General, has joined us in the blogosphere. (Via my fellow-Santa Barbaran Doc Searls.)

With not much fanfare (and still needing a few design tweaks), nor a fancy name, the Jerry Brown blog launched yesterday.

Here's to you, Mr. Mayor. Welcome!

Lowell Feld, a frequent commenter on BOP, has an op-ed piece in the Augusta (VA) Free Press. He wrote it originally for Raising Kaine, the blog he publishes to support Tim Kaine for the governorship of Virginia.

In "Southern Comfort" he makes short shrift of the conventional wisdom that Howard Dean is a "northeastern Liberal," and concludes that Dean, as DNC chair, is "very good news for Southern moderate/conservative Democrats like Mark Warner and Tim Kaine." You can read it here.

Syria and Iran have declared their intention to form a "common front." (Via MSNBC.) They've been de facto allies for a long time. Why the public affirmation today? What does that portend?

(Rice and Rumsfeld testify on the Hill today.)

Martin Wolf is one of the most important financial commentators on the global scene, today his Financial Times Piece calls for better aid programs to eliminate global povertry. Wolf is neither wooly headed nor does he have a bleeding heart, he is not calling merely for the increase in global aid budgets, he is not asking for unaccountable euros merely to be airlifted in. But importantly, he reminds people that the elimination of poverty is one of the goods for which the global economy exists.

A few new updates to Rhubarb is Susan, the occasional blog of poetry microreviews. For those unfamiliar with my baby, RiS is a collection of reviews of individual poems taken from the latest issues of a large constellation of journals loosely associated with experimental or avant-garde writing. As always, comments and suggestions for future reviews are solicited.

Take a look at reviews of The Eggs of my Amnesia (Lara Glenum), of Slovenian poet Tomaz Salamun, and a fun review of an 19 second audio file by the poet Alicia Askenase. If you've been keeping up, jump to the latest reviews here and here

You should also check out, if you haven't already, the review of G. C. Waldrep's work, where I say contentious things about interactive fiction and feminism. Finally, as I note in a brief update, some work of my own is now available on the elimae site.

Via Corente I come across this little nugget:

The U.S. economy grew at a brisk 4.4% clip last year, but it was not until last month that the number of jobs recovered to the levels of early 2001. The Labor Department pegs the unemployment rate at 5.2%, the lowest in four years, but the share of people who have stopped hunting for work is the largest it has been since 1988. Today's job growth is more than twice as slow as it was after the 1990-91 recession, and slower than during any recovery since World War II, analysts say.

The discrepancy is fueling a growing debate about whether such low employment growth is a harbinger of a world in which businesses can rake in increasing profits without much of it trickling down to workers.

Coinages abound. James Wolcott calls it Manchurian Beefcake. Then there's Loose Gannon and Propagannon. Why not just Deep Throat?

Is this our Watergate moment? Is this the break in? Is the blogosphere the Woodward & Bernstein of 2005?

Fearless, hard-charging media analyst Robert McChesney, founder of FreePress.net, spoke here yesterday on the UC-Santa Barbara campus to a large and enthusiastic audience made up of students, faculty, activists, concerned citizens — and even our gracious congresswoman, Lois Capps, who patiently waited her turn in line to ask the passionate professor her questions.

I have a meeting later this week with some progressive Virginia Democratic candidates about their blog strategies--and it occured to me that the BOP community has a wealth of information and expertise that I pale against.

So I am asking for your advice: as bloggers, and readers, and as candidates, how have you seen blogs used effectively in local political campaigns? And how can we do an even better job?

For those looking for how the conservative press is going to interpret Blogging here it is. Defy the right wing, and there will be a blogstorm aimed at you personally. Since far right wing journalists are protected, while others are not, blogging is going to be used as simply a newer and spiffier way of destroying journalists who step outside of the line of right wing orthodoxy. It will work too.

So expect the press to become more, not less, blogmatic.

There's an old joke in Latin America that runs as follows "why doesn't the US have coups? Because there's no US embassy in Washington."

Let's talk about the Venezuelan arms order from Russia. Here's the deal - there are a hundred thousand AK-47's in the order because Chavez wants to arm the peasantry. This is two-prong - it's aimed at Colombia, should they invade, but it's also aimed at Venezuela's land owners. A lot of peasants feel that land reform has moved too slowly and at this point it is Chavez's personal popularity which is holding back violence intended to take the land from the big landowners.

Every party is two parties: the party where it is the majority party, and the party where it is the minority party. Getting these two roles straight is essential to winning power on a national level. The Republican Party is the party of "small government" in the places where it is the minority party, and the party of massive military government and ag subsidies where it is the majority party. The reason this works is that "small government" means, to its base "keep money out of the hands of the urban poor" - and there are a variety of memes, such as "crime" used to make it clear.

Part of the problem is that the Democratic Party first does not recognize that it is now the secondary party in the South, and second it does not understand how to balance where it is a majority party and where it is a minority party - the narrative of one interferes with the other. As a consequence Democrats spend a great deal of time "fighting" over left and right, when instead it should be encoding words which, while the mean the same thing, take on different colour in the two regions.

But this requires getting one thing straight: the Democratic Party must accept that it is the party of capital development, the successor to the Republican party of the 1860-1912 period, and that its national base must be solidified in the Mississippi river valley and in the Southwest. The "Union Coalition".