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According to a dispatch in the Cablegate Wikileaks treasure trove, American Ambassador to Kyrgyzstan Tatiana Gfoeller attended a two-hour brunch to brief HRH Prince Andrew Duke of York ahead of his meetings with the Kyrgyz Prime Minister. Much of the banter is actually quite amusing and a rare peek into the attitudes of the British royal family.

2. (C) British Ambassador to the Kyrgyz Republic Paul Brummell invited the Ambassador to participate in briefing His Royal Highness Prince Andrew, the Duke of York, ahead of his October 28 meetings with Kyrgyz Prime Minister Igor Chudinov and other high-level officials. The Prince was in Kyrgyzstan to promote British economic interests. Originally scheduled to last an hour over brunch, the briefing ended up lasting two hours, thanks to the super-engaged Prince’s pointed questions. The Ambassador was the only participant who was not a British subject or linked to the Commonwealth. The absence of her French and German colleagues was notable; they were apparently not invited despite being fellow members of the European Union. Others included major British investors in Kyrgyzstan and the Canadian operator of the Kumtor mine.

“ALL OF THIS SOUNDS EXACTLY LIKE FRANCE”
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¶5. (C) After having half-heartedly danced around the topic for a bit, only mentioning “personal interests” in pointed fashion, the business representatives then plunged into describing what they see as the appallingly high state of corruption in the Kyrgyz economy. While claiming that all of them never participated in it and never gave out bribes, one representative of a middle-sized company stated that “It is sometimes an awful temptation.” In an astonishing display of candor in a public hotel where the brunch was taking place, all of the businessmen then chorused that nothing gets done in Kyrgyzstan if President Bakiyev’s son Maxim does not get “his cut.” Prince Andrew took up the topic with gusto, saying that he keeps hearing Maxim’s name “over and over again” whenever he discusses doing business in this country. Emboldened, one businessman said that doing business here is “like doing business in the Yukon” in the nineteenth century, i.e. only those willing to participate in local corrupt practices are able to make any money. His colleagues all heartily agreed, with one pointing out that “nothing ever changes here. Before all you heard was Akayev’s son’s name. Now it’s Bakiyev’s son’s name.” At this point the Duke of York laughed uproariously, saying that: “All of this sounds exactly like France.”

RUDE LANGUAGE A LA BRITISH
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¶13. (C) The brunch had already lasted almost twice its allotted time, but the Prince looked like he was just getting started. Having exhausted the topic of Kyrgyzstan, he turned to the general issue of promoting British economic interests abroad. He railed at British anti-corruption investigators, who had had the “idiocy” of almost scuttling the Al-Yamama deal with Saudi Arabia. (NOTE: The Duke was referencing an investigation, subsequently closed, into alleged kickbacks a senior Saudi royal had received in exchange for the multi-year, lucrative BAE Systems contract to provide equipment and training to Saudi security forces. END NOTE.) His mother’s subjects seated around the table roared their approval. He then went on to “these (expletive) journalists, especially from the National Guardian, who poke their noses everywhere” and (presumably) make it harder for British businessmen to do business. The crowd practically clapped. He then capped this off with a zinger: castigating “our stupid (sic) British and American governments which plan at best for ten years whereas people in this part of the world plan for centuries.” There were calls of “hear, hear” in the private brunch hall. Unfortunately for the assembled British subjects, their cherished Prince was now late to the Prime Minister’s. He regretfully tore himself away from them and they from him. On the way out, one of them confided to the Ambassador: “What a wonderful representative for the British people! We could not be prouder of our royal family!”

¶14. (C) COMMENT: Prince Andrew reached out to the Ambassador with cordiality and respect, evidently valuing her insights. However, he reacted with almost neuralgic patriotism whenever any comparison between the United States and United Kingdom came up. For example, one British businessman noted that despite the “overwhelming might of the American economy compared to ours” the amount of American and British investment in Kyrgyzstan was similar. Snapped the Duke: “No surprise there. The Americans don’t understand geography. Never have. In the U.K., we have the best geography teachers in the world!” END COMMENT.

cablegate.wikileaks.org

Two very different videos on Social Media…one inspiring, one impressive yet slightly scary…

Eric Schmidt, Alec Ross & Jared Cohen on 21st Century Statecraft. Google is increasingly getting involved in geo-politics.

Web 2.0 Summit 2010: Mark Zuckerberg, “A Conversation with Mark Zuckerberg” …the man is a social media machine!

Scenario planning derives from the observation that, given the impossibility of knowing precisely how the future will play out, a good decision or strategy to adopt is one that plays out well across several possible futures. To find that “robust” strategy, scenarios are created in plural, such that each scenario diverges markedly from the others. These sets of scenarios are, essentially, specially constructed stories about the future, each one modeling a distinct, plausible world in which we might someday have to live and work.

Interesting thoughts on hierarchies vs networks in this influential paper by Anne-Marie Slaughter, America’s Edge: Power in the Networked Century.

In this world, the measure of power is connectedness. Almost 30 years ago, the psychologist Carol Gilligan wrote about differences between the genders in their modes of thinking. She observed that men tend to see the world as made up of hierarchies of power and seek to get to the top, whereas women tend to see the world as containing webs of relationships and seek to move to the center. Gilligan’s observations capture the differences between the twentieth-century and the twenty-first-century worlds.

Hmm maybe we should put more thought into our tweets…Library of Congress Will Save Tweets as History

Knowing that the Library of Congress will be preserving Twitter messages for posterity could subtly alter the habits of some users, said Paul Saffo, a visiting scholar at Stanford who specializes in technology’s effect on society.

“After all,” Mr. Saffo said, “your indiscretions will be able to be seen by generations and generations of graduate students.”

People thinking before they post on Twitter: now that would be historic indeed.

Read the article here: nytimes.com

The 33 ton bronze statue by Sir Richard Westmacott (located in the south east corner of the park) was erected in 1822 by the swooning “Women of England” and, cheekily, was the city’s first nude monument. Strangely, the muscled vision of manhood it depicts is of neither Wellington nor Achilles, but is actually based on a statue of a horse-tamer in the Piazza del Quirinale in Rome. The bronze was salvaged from captured French canon, and a fig leaf addition was later added to “preserve public decency”.

Wellington-mania swept across London during the first half of the nineteenth century; this colossal figure was the first of many public celebrations of the Iron Duke. He was indeed the celebrity mega-star of his day.

Clifton Pugh’s portrait of Gough Whitlam in Parliament House in Canberra.

After Gough Whitlam was dismissed as a result of the Australian constitutional crisis of 1975, he refused to sit for the traditional portrait which is done of Australian Prime Ministers.  He instructed that the 1972 Archibald Prize winning portrait by Clifton Pugh be used instead. 

Saw this interesting quote attributed to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in the mid 19th century:

The worst moment for the atheist is when he is really thankful and has nobody to thank.

Just discovered these guys… a very interesting bunch!

Proserpine, 1873-1877, at Tate Gallery, London. Painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Back in June 2004 I setup a little makeshift observatory on Mount Steele in Moore Park to observe a very rare event, a Transit of Venus in front of the sun, an event that links directly back to the Captain Cook’s journey to the southern seas and by lucky chance ended up discovering Australia.

Transits of Venus are among the rarest of predictable astronomical phenomena and currently occur in a pattern that repeats every 243 years, so this transit connects to observations also made from Tahiti 1769 on the first voyage of Captain Cook, at a location still known as “Point Venus”.

My advanced equipment setup on Moore Park hill, a telescope, white plastic plate and park bench:

And there she is!

And after a bit of ‘post production’, processing….

Transits can currently occur only in June or December. These dates are slowly becoming later in the year; before 1631, transits occurred in May and November. Transits usually occur in pairs, on nearly the same date eight years apart. This is because the length of eight Earth years is almost the same as 13 years on Venus, so every eight years the planets are in roughly the same relative positions. This approximate conjunction usually results in a pair of transits.

The next transit occurs in 2012 June 5–6, Visible in its entirety from Hawaii, Alaska, Australia, the Pacific and eastern Asia, with the beginning of the transit visible from North America. The next is not then until 2117 December 10–11..so don’t miss 2012 !!!!

Bristol June 6 2012… Got a brief glimpse before the queens diamond jubilee clouds moved in…notice the bunting on the balcony

the virtual mobile sunrise view from Bristol (technology has moved on during the intervening 8 years)

and simultaneously at virtual sunset in Sydney.