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Archives
the war against some terrorists
The Sandbox
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Welcome to The Sandbox, our command-wide milblog, featuring comments, anecdotes, and observations from service members currently deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. This is GWOT-lit's forward position, offering those in-country a chance to share their experiences and reflections with the rest of us. The Sandbox's focus is not on policy and partisanship (go to our Blowback page for that), but on the unclassified details of deployment -- the everyday, the extraordinary, the wonderful, the messed-up, the absurd. The Sandbox is a clean, lightly-edited debriefing environment where all correspondence is read, and as much as possible is posted. And contributors may rest assured that all content, no matter how robust, is currently secured by the First Amendment.
MORTAR MORNINGS
You're frozen. For a split second every muscle in your body tenses, and your mind draws a blank. Was that incoming? Wait for the alarm. If it was an incoming round, the siren blares off with a recorded voice and electronic bell "Incoming! Incoming! Incoming! Bing bing bing. Incoming! Incoming! Incoming!" Stay calm, get to cover, listen for the splash, look at your buddies and smile....Wait.
Everybody has their own "So there I was getting mortared" story. I was once pulling gate guard on my little FOB with a young infantry private I had never met before. We sat in a 113 (Armored Personnel Carrier) that acted as the gate. If someone needed to get on or off the FOB you just started the vehicle and threw it in reverse, let them drive by, then pulled back into your place. So there we sat one morning. I was in the driver's hatch and Pfc. L was behind me in the crew compartment with his SAW. We heard the first round strike about 100m's away, inside the FOB. We looked around for someone to tell: "There's incoming!!"
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photography
SEYDOU KEITA
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I started to photograph in 1945 in BAMAKO. I am self taught; I had a 6x9 camera that one of my uncles had brought me back from Senegal. He had given to me also money to buy film. It all started like that. Honestly, it's a craft that I practiced the better that I could : I was really in love with photography.
At the beginning I photographed my family. Some attitudes worked, some others not. I really had a bad start : people moved and I probably trembled myself. When printing, they all looked like skeletons. You see : I was really undertrained. I was asking my client the money for the print that I was doing at Pierre Garnier's or at Mountaga's lab. He taught me how to print. If the print didn't come out well, I was into problems; clients were very angry, but they were the ones that moved!
In 1948 Mountaga admitted that I was qualified enough to lend me over his darkroom. I was doing all the processing, but in black and white only. Colour was around of course, but you had to send the films to France and anyway, I didn't like it. For me it was the black and white that was the right thing. In those days, there were 4 photographers in BAMAKO : Issouf, Boundyana, Mountaga and myself. Malik Sidibe came afterwards. We were all doing portraits, but people used to say that my "cards" were the best. I had a stamp that I put on all my prints.
In 1949, I bought a view camera and started with 5x7 negatives. I was doing contact prints, that's why I prefered 5x7. I had pinned on the walls of the studio various samples of my work : men or women in bust, alone or by two, or even groups up to 6 people, families and so on. The clients were telling me : we want to be photographed like this, you see? And I was doing it. But sometimes I was changing for a position that looked better. I was the one to decide in the last and I was never mistaking. It took only a few minutes, I shot one negative, never more. Many people were coming, buy on Saturdays, it was crowded: people were queueing: all sorts: shopkeepers, office clerks; even the president of the Republic came. I was doing the printing overnight and the spotting in the morning just before the clients would come and pick up their portrait.
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Who Owns Seydou Keďta?
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EVEN by the elevated standard of the New York art world, the rumor was exceptional: a tin of negatives buried in Africa for three decades that, when opened, revealed the work of a photographer who was neither "outsider" nor "indigenous" but spectacularly modern. And so the bejeweled and bohemian showed up at the Gagosian Gallery the evening of Oct. 18, 1997, wearing Fulani bracelets beneath their Charvet cuffs, blouses referencing Matisse referencing North African fabrics, Xhosa men in dinner jackets.
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israel
I've been reading a biography of I.F. Stone. He was a legendary journalist that, in his later years, took on the establishment single handed. I will be posting more on him when I post the review. He wasn't one to take information handouts from the high and powerful. He dug out the information. I.F. Stone was a Jew and was very interested in Israel. From a footnote in the piece below:
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I first arrived in Palestine on Balfour Day Nov. 2, 1945, the day the Haganah blew up bridges and watch towers to begin its struggle against the British and immigration restrictions. The following spring I was the first newspaperman to travel with illegal Jewish immigrants from the Polish-Czech border through the British blockade. In 1947 I celebrated Passover in the British detention camps in Cyprus and in 1948 I covered the Arab-Jewish war. See my Underground to Palestine (1946) and This is Israel (1948). I was back in 1949, 1950, 1951, 1956, and 1964.
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While I.F. Stone felt there should be a homeland for Jews in Palestine, he felt it should be a binational state. One state for two peoples. This piece was written in 1967 just after the 6 Day War when Israel took over and occupied the West Bank and Gaza. He called it like it turned out in this review of Les Temps Modernes.
Holy War
By I. F. Stone
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THE EXPERIENCES from which M. Sartre draws his emotional ties are irrelevant to this new struggle. Both sides draw from them conclusions which must horrify the man of rationalist tradition and universalist ideals. The bulk of the Jews and the Israelis draw from the Hitler period the conviction that, in this world, when threatened one must be prepared to kill or be killed. The Arabs draw from the Algerian conflict the conviction that, even in dealing with so rational and civilized a people as the French, liberation was made possible only by resorting to the gun and the knife. Both Israeli and Arabs in other words feel that only force can assure justice. In this they agree, and this sets them on a collision course. For the Jews believe justice requires the recognition of Israel as a fact; for the Arabs, to recognize the fact is to acquiesce in the wrong done them by the conquest of Palestine. If God as some now say is dead, He no doubt died of trying to find an equitable solution to the Arab-Jewish problem.
The argument between them begins with the Bible. "I give this country to your posterity," God said to Abraham (Gen. XV:18) "from the river of Egypt up to the great river, Euphrates." Among the Jews, whether religious or secular mystics, this is the origin of their right to the Promised Land. The opening article in the Arab section of Les Temps Modernes retorts that the "posterity" referred to in Genesis includes the descendants of Ishmael since he was the son of Abraham by his concubine Ketirah, and the ancestor of all the Arabs, Christian or Muslim.
All this may seem anachronistic nonsense, but this is an anachronistic quarrel. The Bible is still the best guide to it. Nowhere else can one find a parallel for its ethnocentric fury. Nowhere that I know of is there a word of pity in the Bible for the Canaanites whom the Hebrews slaughtered in taking possession. Of all the nonsense which marks the Jewish-Arab quarrel none is more nonsensical than the talk from both sides about the Holy Land as a symbol of peace. No bit of territory on earth has been soaked in the blood of more battles. Nowhere has religion been so zestful an excuse for fratricidal strife. The Hebrew shalom and the Arabic salaam are equally shams, relics of a common past as Bedouins. To this day inter-tribal war is the favorite sport of the Bedouins; to announce "peace" in the very first word is a necessity if any chance encounter is not to precipitate bloodshed.
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I WAS ENCOURAGED to find in this volume that the most objective view of the Arab question on the Israeli side was written by Yehudah Harkabi, a Haifa-born professional soldier, a brigadier general, but a general who holds a diploma in philosophy and Arabic studies from the Hebrew University and from Harvard. He has written a book on Nuclear War and Nuclear Peace. His article "Hawks or Doves" is extraordinary in its ability to rise above prejudice and sentiment. He does not shut his eyes at all to the Arab case. He feels peace can come only if we have the strength to confront its full human reality. "Marx affirms," he concludes, "that knowledge of the truth frees man from the determinism of history." It is only, General Harkabi says, when Israel is prepared "to accept the truth in its entirety that it will find the new strength necessary to maintain and consolidate its existence." The path to safety and the path to greatness lies in reconciliation. The other route, now that the West Bank and Gaza are under Israeli jurisdiction, leads to two new perils. The Arab populations now in the conquered territories make guerrilla war possible within Israel's own boundaries. And externally, if enmity deepens and tension rises between Israel and the Arab states, both sides will by one means or another obtain nuclear weapons for the next round.
This will change the whole situation. No longer will Israeli and Arab be able to play the game of war in anachronistic fashion as an extension of politics by other means. Neither will they be able to depend on a mutual balance of terror like the great powers with their "second strike" capacity. In this pygmy struggle the first strike will determine the outcome and leave nothing behind. Nor will the great Powers be able to stand aside and let their satellites play out their little war, as in 1948, 1956, and 1967. I have not dwelt here on the responsibility of the great powers, because if they did not exist the essential differences in the Arab-Israeli quarrel would still remain, and because both sides use the great power question as an excuse to ignore their own responsibilities. The problem for the new generation of Arabs is the social reconstruction of their decayed societies; the problem will not go away if Israel disappears. Indeed their task is made more difficult by the failure to recognize Israel since that means a continued emphasis on militarization, diversion of resources, and domination by military men. For Israel, the problem is reconciliation with the Arabs; the problem will not go away even if Moscow and Washington lie down together like the lion and the lamb or blow each other to bits. But the great Powers for their part cannot continue the cynical game of arming both sides in a struggle for influence when the nuclear stage is reached. It is significant that the one place where the Israeli and Arab contributors to this symposium tend to common conclusions is in the essays discussing the common nuclear danger. To denuclearize the Middle East, to defuse it, will require some kind of neutralization. Otherwise the Arab-Israeli conflict may some day set off a wider Final Solution. That irascible Old Testament God of Vengeance is fully capable, if provoked, of turning the whole planet into a crematorium.
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Much has changed since I.F. Stone wrote these words and much remains the same.
a word
One small word is one giant sigh of relief for Armstrong
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IT WAS the perfect quote to match a momentous occasion. As Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the Moon in 1969, a global audience of 500 million people on Earth watched and listened with bated breath.
“That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” they heard him say as he dropped from the ladder of his spacecraft to make the first human footprint on the lunar surface.
But from the moment he said it, and for 37 years since, debate has raged over whether the Nasa astronaut might have fluffed his lines.
Mr Armstrong has long insisted that he meant to say “one small step for a man . . .” — which would have been a more meaningful and grammatically correct version, free of tautology. But even the astronaut himself could not be sure.
“Damn, I really did it. I blew the first words on the Moon, didn’t I?” he is reported to have asked officials later, amid uncertainty as to whether he had blown the moment or simply been drowned out by static interference as his words were relayed 250,000 miles back to Earth.
Now, after almost four decades, the spaceman has been vindicated. Using high-tech sound analysis techniques, an Australian computer expert has rediscovered the missing “a” in Mr Armstrong’s famous quote. Peter Shann Ford ran the Nasa recording through sound-editing software and clearly picked up an acoustic wave from the word “a”, finding that Mr Armstrong spoke it at a rate of 35 milliseconds — ten times too fast for it to be audible.
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thanks to DANGEROUSMETA!
environment
The Freshwater Boom is Over. Our Rivers Are Starting to Run Dry
We can avert global thirst - but it means cutting carbon emissions by 60%. Sounds ridiculous? Consider the alternative
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It looks dull, almost impenetrable in places. But if its findings are verified, it could turn out to be the most important scientific report published so far this year. In this month's edition of the Journal of Hydrometeorology is a paper written by scientists at the Met Office, which predicts future patterns of rainfall and evaporation.
Those who dispute that climate change is taking place, such as Melanie Phillips of the Daily Mail, like to point out that that the predicted effects of global warming rely on computer models, rather than "observable facts". That's the problem with the future - you can't observe it. But to have any hope of working out what might happen, you need a framework of understanding. It's either this or the uninformed guesswork that Phillips seems to prefer.
The models can be tested by means of what climate scientists call backcasting - seeing whether or not they would have predicted changes that have already taken place. The global climate model used by the Met Office still needs to be refined. While it tracks past temperature changes pretty closely, it does not accurately backcast the drought patterns in every region. But it correctly reproduces the total global water trends over the past 50 years. When the same model is used to forecast the pattern over the 21st century, it uncovers "a net overall global drying trend" if greenhouse gas emissions are moderate or high. "On a global basis, drought events are slightly more frequent and of much longer duration by the second half of the 21st century relative to the present day." In these dry, stodgy phrases, we find an account of almost unimaginable future misery.
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Breathing Earth
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music
whitney music box
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a musical realization of the motion graphics of john whitney as described in his book "digital harmony"
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thanks to Neatorama
free markets
Please Save Free Markets From the Right Wing, "Telecom Edition"
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Ok, let me explain something to the free market fundamentalists, who no more understand what a free market is than most Christians understand what being Christ-like means. (Hint: if you are pro war and think getting wealthy is a worthwhile goal, Christ would have had nothing to do with you. Good luck getting that camel through the eye of that needle.)
Unregulated markets in most goods or services tend towards either oligopolies or monopolies. They do not tend towards markets competing on price and quality amongst a large number of providers. Over time, in most markets, the natural competitive instinct is to acquire - to integrate until you're in control.
Why? Because the best way to make a profit is to provide something people need and must have and can't get from anyone else. If you are the only person who has food, you can charge anything. If you are the only company providing gasoline, you can charge almost anything. And so on. Or, rather, in the modern world, if you are one of a few it's pretty easy to come to an understanding on price, even if that understanding is based on a wink and a nod.
If you are the only company providing broadband connections (or one of only a few) to a large chunk of the US (or if it's just you and the local cable company) you can jack the price up to as high as the market can bear. And since no one is really competing with you, there's no need to really improve service.
This is what the Department of Justice has just decided to do by approving the merger of Bellsouth and AT&T - a merger which control almost half of all landlines in the United States. The CEO of AT&T, as Matt Stoller points out, is on the record against Net Neutrality - as would you be if you were in his position - charging more for access by customers, and more for access to those customers by companies on the net sure sounds great.
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photography
The Lafayette Negative Archive
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The workmen wore thick overalls and gloves to clear the jumble of glass and cardboard boxes piled high in a London attic.
Their instructions were to throw away everything and redecorate. However, Terry Thurston, the foreman, took a second look at the "rubbish" buried beneath a thick layer of dust, cobwebs and broken glass, and knew he couldn't throw out the thousands of glass negatives scattered everywhere.
But for his alertness, history would have ended up in a skip. Although he did not know it, Thurston had saved for the nation one of the largest and most important collections of 19th and early 20th century portrait photographs.
"I wiped one or two faces and there were Queen Victoria and Lloyd George looking up at me. I just couldn't throw them out, he said last week.
The filthy and disordered mess turned out to the the archive of the Lafayette studio, a photographic firm to which Queen Victoria gave a royal warrant on March 5, 1887. The most prominent people at court, in society, politics and the services sat for the studio in New Bond Street.
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Sophia Nicholaievna, Countess de Torby (1868-1927), daughter of Prince Nicholas William of Nassau; m. (1891) (morganatically) H.I.H. Grand Duke Michael Mikhailovitch of Russia.
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thanks to gmtPlus9
book recommendations
 
Drinking the Sea at Gaza, by Amira Hass, was one of the first books I read about Israel and Palestine. The One State Solution, by Virginia Tilley, is the latest.
Drinking the Sea at Gaza:
Days and Nights in a Land Under Siege
by Amira Hass
It was over four years ago that I started reading about American built Israeli f-16s and attack helicopters bombing the civilians of Palestine. That was sort of my "what the fuck" moment about Israel/Palestine. I started reading about what was going on. This was one of the first books I read and is still one of the best. One of the problems I ran into right away was the inability of anyone to believe anything a Palestinian had to say so I started looking for writings by Israeli Jews. Amira Hass is an Israeli Jew whose parents were holocaust survivors. She was a reporter for the Israeli paper Haaretz. Hass was assigned to cover the situation in Gaza as the Oslo Accord was implemented. She took the radical approach of moving to Gaza to see first hand. What a concept. About that same time I was emailing an Israeli about how she saw things. I asked her if she actually knew any Palestinians. She had only ever met one. It's amazing how ignorant Israelis are of Palestinians. From Amazon:
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In recent years, several Israeli scholars, journalists, and even a few individuals with ties to the Israeli military have written critical and pathbreaking books on the degradation of life in the Palestinian refugee camps and other areas under Israeli control. This book, written by an Israeli journalist for the daily Haaretz, belongs to that category of work. The author lived in the Gaza Strip and personally observed the events she so eloquently relates in this highly readable and lucid book. She describes in agonizing detail the hardship and deprivation experienced by ordinary Palestinians as they live their lives under Israeli rule. As the author points out, the unrelenting difficulties and humiliations experienced by ordinary Palestinians have not changed since the Oslo peace process and the establishment of the Palestinian Authority in parts of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Stories and moving testimonials gathered by the author add a much-needed human dimension to the Palestinian tragedy. Highly recommended for all readers interested in the future of the Palestinian-Israeli peace process.
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This book ends prior to the beginning of the second Intifada. This is a must read. Amira Hass now lives in the West Bank and still writes for Haaretz.
The One-State Solution:
A Breakthrough for Peace in the Israeli-Palestinian Deadlock
by Virginia Tilley
Israel has never had any intention of allowing a Palestinian State. But Israel can't get rid of the Palestinians. They won't go away no matter how bad Israel makes it for them and world opion won't allow the ethnic cleansing that many Israelis would like to see. The Israelis call it "transfer". Israel has continued to steal land from the Palestinians to build illegal settlements. The settlements, and the Jews only roads that support them, have divided the West Bank up into non-contiguous bits of land for the Palestinians. There is no way for there to be a viable Palestinian State because of the Israeli facts on the ground. That is as the Israelis intended. Sharon has said that the future of the Palestinians is a reservation or a Bantustan under complete Israeli military control. The problem is that, in not too many years, there will be more Palestinians than Jews in Israel/Palestine and they will want the vote. Quite a conundrum Israel has. From Amazon:
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The One-State Solution demonstrates that Israeli settlements have already encroached on the occupied territory of the West Bank and Gaza Strip to the extent that any Palestinian state in those areas is unviable. It reveals the irreversible impact of Israel’s settlement grid by summarizing its physical, demographic, financial, and political dimensions. Virginia Tilley explains why we should assume that this grid will not be withdrawn —or its expansion reversed—by reviewing the role of the key political actors: the Israeli government, the United States, the Arab states, and the European Union. Finally, the book addresses the daunting obstacles to a one-state solution—including major revision of the Zionist dream but also Palestinian and other regional resistance—and offers some ideas about how those obstacles might be addressed.
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Tilley lays out the recent history and states the problem very well. She also proposes some solutions and processes. It's just the beginning. But it is clear that there will not be two states. There will be only one.
republican pedophiles and the fundamentalists
This is a very interesting look at what how the Republican shenanigans affect their fundamentalist base.
Sara's Sunday Rant: The Ultimate Betrayal
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Less than two months ago, during my first week here at Orcinus, I wrote the second segment of my series, Cracks In The Wall (which Dave swears he's gonna put all the links to in the margin any day now, really). In that post, I combined John Dean's observations in his book Conservatives Without Conscience with my personal knowledge of the fundamentalist terrain, and listed some of the more common triggering events that inspire individual fundamentalists to start seeking alternatives to authoritarian religion.
The very first item I listed -- in no small part because, in my experience, it's the most important and common one of the bunch -- was Betrayal By Authority. Here's what I said about it:
Dean notes that authoritarian followers voluntarily choose their leaders, usually on the basis of how strongly those leaders support the follower's belief system. Cultural or political leaders who don't support the belief system (for example, federal court judges, scientists, progressive celebrities) are seen as illegitimate authorities, and become targets of followers' aggression.
We've all come up against these people, and have been totally confounded with their "my leader can do no wrong" attitude. They believe outrageous lies, and forgive all manner of sins. Democratic strategists keep trying to run campaigns that will reach these people on the basis of evidence and fact -- and are perplexed to find their attempts at education totally rebuffed. George Bush may have lied us into a war, wrecked our economy, saddled our great-grandchildren with debt, savaged the poor, and alienated the entire world; but he is Our Leader, and we will always take his word over anyone else's. We do not accept you as a legitimate authority. We don't care what you have to say, because you have no standing at all in our little world.
Mere political or cultural betrayal, no matter how destructive, does not cut through this piece of the wall. The guilt-evaporation process applies to both followers and leaders: you must forgive all wrongs committed by someone inside the fold. Our leader didn't lie; he was misunderstood, his words distorted by our enemies. Besides, he would never lie to us. Besides, he is just following orders -- or God's will, which is beyond our understanding. Besides, our own forgiveness depends on our ability to forgive, and so we will -- never mind the contradictions.
And yet, even so: There is one -- and only one -- sin so heinous that it cannot be rationalized away by the authoritarian thought process. It is this: the leader's main job is to protect his abused and terrified horde from personal harm (or, for that matter, any sudden negative change to their immediate status quo). A leader who wantonly allows one of his followers to intimately experience such harm breaks that contract. It is in that moment of betrayal that some followers come to their senses, and start looking for a reckoning.
It's important to note: the betrayal must be an intensely personal breach that has a deep, immediate, life-changing impact on the individual follower. Fundies don't think in abstracts. Big national debts, epic political prevarications, and other people's suffering (even on a global scale) do not impress them. But there are plenty of authoritarian parents across the country who proudly sent a son or daughter off to war -- and later received that precious child home under cover of darkness, in a wooden box, with minimal explanation. That's the kind of personal and profound loss I'm talking about. For many of these patriotic parents, it was also the searing moment of deep betrayal that broke the spell and shoved them off in the direction of the Wall.
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Two months ago, I couldn't have imagined in my wildest dreams that the Ultimate Betrayal would arrive so quickly. I doubt any of us could have. But that's exactly what we're seeing this week in the aftermath of the Hastert/Reynolds/Shimkus debacle.
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astronomy
It's important to realize, every once and a while, that the universe is bigger than our little problems here on Earth.
Opportunity's Panoramas of Martian Crater Thrill Scientists
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The Mars rover Opportunity yesterday sent back its first color panorama of the large Martian crater it reached last week after a 21-month trek, and NASA scientists could barely contain their excitement about what they saw.
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torture for oil
Craig Murray on Manufacturing Terror
Oil, Lily Pad Bases and Torture
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The Bush administration has been about "the Greater Middle East" (including Central Asia). It has been about basing rights in those areas. It says it is fighting a "war on terror" that is unlike past wars and may go on for decades. It has been about rounding up and torturing large numbers of Iraqis, Afghans and others. This region has most of the world's proven oil and gas reserves.
Why is the Bush administration so attached to torturing people that it would pressure a supine Congress into raping the US constitution by explicitly permitting some torture techniques and abolishing habeas corpus for certain categories of prisoners?
Boys and girls, it is because torture is what provides evidence for large important networks of terrorists where there aren't really any, or aren't very many, or aren't enough to justify 800 military bases and a $500 billion military budget.
I was at the conference of the Central Eurasian Studies Society the last couple of days. Saturday evening, former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray addressed us. He served in Tashkent 2002 through 2004. Murray was providing copies of his new book, "Murder in Samarkand," which unfortunately is not yet available in the United States.
Murray raised the curtain on the Bush-Blair "War on Terror." He does not deny that there are small groups of persons intent on harming the West. But he does not think that most of what the Bush administration has done in Central Asia is about that threat.
He explained what is really behind the new "lily pad" doctrine of US bases, whereby the US is seeking to encompass the "Greater Middle East" with small bases, each with 1,000 to 3,000 personnel. In emergencies, these bases could quickly swell to 40,000. Like a lily pad, they can "open up" and accommodate a landing frog. Murray said that the US documents are quite open as to why they are seeking the network of lily pad bases around the Middle East. It is because that is where the oil and gas are. If you include the Caspian region, Tengiz, and the gas reserves in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan along with what is in the Persian Gulf, the vast majority of proven oil and gas reserves are in this circle of crisis.
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working bicycles
This is too cool. I've used my bicycle for shopping but had to carry stuff on my back. I've looked at wire panniers but this solution will really let you carry stuff. (Note to self: I must start riding my bicycle again!)
Xtracycle
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We proudly called it "the bike that hauls," to advertise that you could pile it up with groceries or gear and still beat traffic. And yet, both "amazing load capacity" and "nimble handling"—while true—failed to get at the essence of how the "bike that hauls" changed our own lives, and how it could change yours.
And that's why we probably wouldn't have bought one ourselves; we didn't yet understand the difference between the bicycle as tool and the bicycle as enricher of days. It's the deep essence that words and pictures don't easily capture; like falling in love, you know it when you feel it. And in this case, you only feel it when you ride it—for a few hours or months or just one trip to the store—and realize you have the ability to freely travel anywhere, carrying anything or anyone, and it's not just practical, it's magical.
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And you can make margaritas with your Xtracycle:
Byerley Bicycle Blender
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workbike.org
Beijing bicycles
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energy
The End of Fossil Energy
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Our Addiction to Oil
By 2005, the first indications of peak oil awareness (headlined by the title of this page from President Bush and his 2006 State of the Union Address), started appearing from Washington. On Dec. 8, 2005, the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on energy held its first full-scale congressional hearing on peak oil. A bipartisan caucus co-chaired by Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (R-Maryland) and Rep. Tom Udall (D-New Mexico) along with 16 other congressmen prepared resolution 507 beginning with the following paragraph:
Expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that the United States, in collaboration with other international allies, should establish an energy project with the magnitude, creativity, and sense of urgency that was incorporated in the `Man on the Moon' project to address the inevitable challenges of `Peak Oil'.
Each time the price of oil and gas ratchets a little higher, the mainstream media gives sporadic attention. Unfortunately, the message the public hears is a blend of obfuscation and short-term excuses such as inadequate refinery capacity or terrorist activity in producer countries. (See "We Were Warned" on CNN, March 18 and 19.) As usual, media coverage is "balanced" by conflicting optimism. See page 12 for the usual delusions. Very rarely is the concept mentioned that the world just might be running out ... forever! Very few, big business, the media or most elected leaders can fathom or admit that the oil party is over. We're now faced with a giant hangover.
As with any addiction or terminal-illness prognosis, the first reaction is denial. How can this be? Our entire economy (and our personal plans) are built on never-ending growth fueled primarily by oil. As reality sets in and logic rears its ugly head, the next response will be ... depression, "gloom and doom". Next, we obviously must begin the weaning process without substitution of hopeless quackery. Finally, a proactive search for honest answers and solutions brings back some optimism even if the best first hope is to encourage others, to join a mass movement of public awareness. Remember, our addiction to oil is only a visible part of the other interrelated problems of excess population and ecological devastation.
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A Hard Place
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The purpose of our Iraq project was to stabilize the Middle East by creating a successful buffer state between Iran and Pakistan to the east and the nations west of Iraq, especially Saudi Arabia. Why? To preserve the status quo in our oil deliveries from the region.
Ironically, this last item is the only thing that we have succeeded in -- so far. And one of the reasons the Democratic opposition to Bush has been so unsuccessful is precisely because for all our failure over there, America has not yet experienced a cut-off of Middle East oil -- while anti-war media stars on the Left like Al Franken and Harry Shearer still get to hop in their cars and drive wherever they like without a second thought.
The sentiment among the American public runs increasingly against our adventure in Iraq. But just as no politician has articulated our reason for being there, no one has expressed any coherent idea of what might happen if we had no military presence in the Middle East. I will try to outline a picture of this now.
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vacations
Joe Bageant writes wicked commentary about America the Beautiful. He is concerned about others in this world but, unlike most, he took it upon himself to actually do something.
Under the Blue Mango
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Once one becomes aware of that babies die in the third world as an indirect result of our simplest choices such as buying Ziploc plastic bags or bottled water or driving a car, life changes for any approximately moral American. Restlessness sets in, a nagging guilt that only swells with time until finally night thoughts grow so damned anxious that something has to be done. It's been that way with me for a long time. About a year ago I decided to do something more about it than pat myself on the back for recycling the mountain of bottles and unread magazines our household seems to generate. So last fall I vowed to find a decent third world family and put up the money to do something together to better their lives and my own. The issue was so unbearable by spring this year that, by god, I was determined to get it done.
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Read the link above and then see the results:
The Cabana in Hopkins Village, Belize
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Here are some photos of the cabana I talked about in the essay Under the Blue Mango. Let's be straight here. Obviously, we are not talking Cancun. We are talking about dropping your toilet paper in a paper bag beside the flush toilet (It will later be burned on the beach sand). Belizean "soaker" septic systems are marvelously effective and organic. But toilet paper clogs them up. That should give you some idea.
If you have "planetary eyes," the people and culture of the Garifuna Coast are the main attraction, and they come in as much variety as people anywhere else on the planet. If you want to go diving or fishing or learn drumming, all those certainly available in Hopkins. But some American tourists find parts of the village too shabby for their tastes. I've seen worse places than Hopkins in the US. On the other hand, if you like knowing your money is helping a family educate their kids, there's Luke and Marzy's cabana. The kids playing in the sand under the trees in the yard are: Kirk, Dennis, Ebony, Lyan, Luke Jr.
Rates:
The cabana is $22 a day. Marzy may squint at you and try to get more if you look rich, especially if you drive up in a shiny rented car. The Garifuna have the notion that if you are an American fortunate enough to make 12 times as much as the average Garifuna household, and you drive up in a $35,000 rented SUV, and your fancy trekking shoes cost a month's pay for the average villager, maybe, just maybe, it wouldn't hurt you to cough up a tad more than the Asian student who is just hitchhiking his way across Central America with a bag of rice and some dried fish in his backpack. This escapes most Americans. Anyway, just tell Marzy that's what Joe told you on the Internet site (which, so far as I know, they have never seen because they do not have Internet access) says -- $22-$25 bucks.
Luke and Marzy's phone: 011-501-503-7278
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Make your reservations now.
liars
Lies and Cover-Ups are not "Being in Denial"
Foleygate, Ricegate and Insurgencygate
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The right wing of the Republican Party has a problem with the truth. The American press corps has an addiction to euphemisms.
Bob Woodward called his book "State of Denial." The press around the book raises the question of whether President George W. Bush and his highest officials--Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Condi Rice-- are unable to face the truth ("in denial").
Yet the sort of anecdote Woodward tells, and the new information surfacing on Tenet's briefing of Rice and Hastert's inaction on Foley-- all these do not point to denial or lack of realism. They point to lying and to deliberately spinning and misleading the US public.
I don't understand why US reporters and editors won't call a spade a spade.
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photography
Chambi Collection
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Martin Chambi born in 1891, lived and worked in Cuzco from 1920 until his death in 1973. He practiced as a local and commercial portrait photographer. His studio was frequented by some of the most prominent members of Cuzco society. He photographed weddings, parties, dances, fiestas, but with such skill and perception that his work conveys 'with unexpected intensity the structure and mood of a complex colonial society meeting the 20th century.'
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thanks to gmtPlus9
empire
The End of the Republic
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The US has been in a long slide towards empire for some time. As Stirling observed last week the torture bill, which essentially invalidates the parts of the bill of rights dealing with the rights of those accused of crimes, is part of that slide.
The trend line, and this has been going on for some time, and is not an artifact just of the last five years, nor just of the Republican party (though they have more proponents of it within their ranks) has been going on for at least thirty years and parts of it can be seen in the late sixties.
Its features are the imperial executive, the end of individual rights, the castration of Congress and the reduction of the power of the Courts.
The End of Individual Rights Under the new bill passed last week the President, largely at his discretion, can take any non citizen (including legal residents) and lock them up indefinitely without recourse to civilian courts by declaring them an enemy combatant. He can lock up citizens and the only recourse they have is to determine their combatant status, however you can become a combatant by an act as minor as having written a check. Once determined that a citizen is a combatant they lose the right to any further use of habeas corpus, the right to see the evidence against them, the right not to self incriminate, the right to a speedy trial, the right to safety against cruel and unusual punishment, the right to not be punished till guilt is determined in court, the right to counsel of their choice, the presumption of innocence and the right to a trial by a jury of their peers.
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photography
Juliane Eirich photography
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thanks to Conscientious
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