Blog Thyself: ‘Do You Have The Time, To Listen To Me Whine’
Sunday, February 14th, 2010
Category: Politics, Scratching Sounds, Technology
I remember when it was kind of cool to be a blogger. You’d walk around with a swagger in your step, a twinkle in your eye. Now it’s just humiliating. Blogging has become like mahjong or needlepoint or clipping coupons out of Walgreens circulars: something old folks do while waiting to croak.
(Illustration found here — one among a series of funny blog ‘toons).
In the above snip, Nicholas Carr is offering a take on results released earlier this month of a Pew Internet poll — blogging ain’t popular among the young, and the blogosphere is become mainly a playground for the gray-haired set, a communicative platform moving from cutting-edge to just another redundant device: “Tech experts say it doesn’t mean blogging is going away. Rather, it’s gone the way of the telephone and e-mail — still useful, just not sexy.”
Maybe ChatRoulette is the future — a la Logan’s Run.
Why way-not cool?
A late arrival to the blogging universe: I’m over 60 and have been working this site, Compatible Creatures (bold-face the bold face), only about two-and-a-half years, but enough time to get a measure of this online-only 15-year phenomenon — the surge in popularity coming with the Iraqi war (see a time-line of blogging here) — and how the Internet operates.
So, according to the poll, I’m the age of the blogger, but now I’m at the age of being sick of it all.
News watching nowadays sucks.
Even Vancouver’s version of the winter olympics — a nasty, fatal crash on the luge track and snow-less-weather (really, let’s not yet go to the weather thing, a really, really scary event(s) coming hard, straight and directly right at me, along of course, with the rest of humanity) — carries that now-familiar sketch of a horrid, sad and usually-unfair scenario underneath a commercial bluster or personal bravado.
An example is Haiti.
Underneath the obvious horror of the earthquake was another historical horror — how Catholic Spain and later an arrogant US policy created the horror called Haiti before the horror of the 7.1 quake — and that information is just unconscionable horrible.
See Toussaint L’Ouverture and an early instance of horrible hypocrisy via the historically-famous “Louisiana Purchase” to get just a clue.
And stir in a bit on the current state of affairs with the executive, legislative and judicial branches of the US government is enough to make me blow chunks and want to throttle Lawrence Welk.
In an instance, the Internets might contain too-much data, much-more than a shitload of information, more than a human could ingest without major bowel obstruction, or gop’stipation (so named after Republicans currently in Congress), especially as seen through a prism of whether it’s real or just a wad of monkey turds tossed into the fire to smoke-out the dumb-ass.
Anyone with walking-around sense should know by now some heavy and startling shit is at play upon the land — there’s too many gasping, gaping holes in the overloaded-ship of humanity, with piles of people getting killed in various places, climate change, peak oil, and yes, even “peak soil,” no jobs and no homes, and soon no food, some of these ruptures are well-beyond being conventionally and conveniently patched.
A frightful time, indeed, mama.
Coupled with a natural/earth/enviornment fail point — as last week’s hyper-winter storms so suggests after being cliched into “Snowmageddon” — is a paradoxical and ironically-illogical propensity for potential violence as “serial killer” has mutated into “mass killer.”
(Illustration found here).
Anyway, the subject here is blogging and blogging is writing and writing is research, whether it’s via some academic process or from my own past experience, researched by the brain, all good writing is based upon upon research — hence when in preparing a post, it seems three hundred paragraphs are researched to create one that actually appears in a story.
And hence the news-watching-sucks credo.
Despite it all, however, the Internet dishes it out closer to reality than the MSM — I agree with Lara Logan and her spiel a couple of years ago on US news coverage: “I were to watch the news that you’re watching in the United States, I’d just blow my brains out. ‘Cause it would drive me nuts.”
Blogs are a life-form all its own.
The heads-up on the bloggers’ poll mentioned above came from a kind of blogging-update-on-all-kinds of news site, The Daily Dish, which multi-posts all during the day and the Pew info was originally seen here — The Dish is also most-excellent live-covering events, such as the recent/ongoing unrest in Iran, or the Haiti disaster (I visit The Dish several times a day).
Andrew Sullivan, who administers The Dish via The Atlantic magazine, is gay and a political conservative, which appears to have no bearing on what the overall blog presents — all kinds of junk from politics to sports to sexual practices — except in his own posts and other writings in other media.
Sullivan made blogging popular — he’s currently featured high on President Obama’s reading list — and The Dish is just a sample of a vigorous, though, vaporous culture that’s found bubbling around on the Internets.
There’s even back-stabbing, over-reacting and gossip-mongering amongst the higher-escalations of the blogger community — bloggers feed/deflect off other bloggers, who in turn, although they hate it, must feed/deflect off the MSM (bloggers for the very-most part must depend on the MSM for news reporting) with Sullivan himself taking some unfair raking in the newest virtual dust-up.
Read one angle of the affair here and another here.
A sad commentary on current journalism is the needful fact the best presentation of the horrid news of the day is from false-news organizations — The Daily Show and it’s mentally-unstable twin, The Colbert Report.
Jon Stewart chimed in last week with a mock of the blogosphere’s ranklings in the nefarious ether.
Watch Stewart’s real-funny bit via HuffPost — society on the World-Wide-Web has always carried it’s own word-language, but the whole-shootin’ match really starts to appear other-worldly and preposterous when proclaimed in headlines, so says Stewart: “If you just followed this show on the blogs, you would think I was just running around town, cutting people open from scrote to sternum, wearing their skin as a trophy.”
Dude, these are serious bloggers.
I’m not too serious — NOT!
And this particular blog, Compatible Creatures (bold again), serves just as a creative outlet for myself only (and a tiny-handful of others — 59 people on one particular day last July) and since I enjoyed building/editing newspaper pages years ago, the process of putting together one of these posts is similar, and without a deadline clock on some far wall, it usually takes up considerable, though, enjoyable time — which is healthy, maybe?
Compatible Creatures, compatible creatures — a soft alliterated word sequence to describe things not-so-pretty: war and politics and life.
Funny, huh?
I find it freakin’ hilarious.
So in good standing with the Pew Internet poll, an old guy waiting to croak sits around blogging, and in this particular case, whining.
And speaking of a good whine…
A couple of weeks ago, my daughter who lives just south of Nashville, Tennessee, and I carried on a lengthy gmail chat mostly about music/culture from the 1990s, an era we both agreed was a high-point in rock-n-roll, especially alternate-rock, which came into its own during that decade.
We tossed songs off at each other for a couple of hours, everything from Bush and Alanis Morissette and Third Eye Blind and a bunch from REM and Live with the great “Lightning Crashes” and Soul Asylum and Blur’s Song 2 and Matchbox Twenty and The Wallflowers and even Smash Mouth’s “Walk on the Sun” and Blink 182 along with a shitload of others, a chat intertwined with stuff about movies, TV, friends and her siblings.
And very-much a fun time.
The song that set us off was Green Day’s “Basket Case:”
Do you have the time
To listen to me whine
About nothing and everything
All at once
I am one of those
Melodramatic fools
Neurotic to the bone
No doubt about it
And even with the creeps and paranoia and the mind playin’ freakin’ tricks, one has to get a grip and look at the positive side:
Grasping to control
So I better hold on
Indeed.
Leave a Comment‘And get a note to the milkman: No More Cheese!’
Sunday, January 10th, 2010
Category: Musings, Scratching Sounds
Of course, one can forgive Steve McCroskey for nearly-screaming demands at his wife.
The airport manager was having a real-real neurotic day, was under intense, coronary-inducing pressure, and what the heck, an airliner was in great jeopardy, hundreds of lives were at stake, and Johnny wasn’t helping at all, clowning around, being a total douche-bag.
And on top of all that shit-hitting-the-fan, McCroskey also knew he’d picked by-far the worst-possible day to quit amphetamines and his beloved glue.
Sniffing the glowworm: Saturday afternoon, us up here along the northern California coast felt a 6.5 earthquake, and although I’ve felt quakes before — some long, some short, some weird, some not-so weird — this particular one was among those few shakers that really unsettled me.
So panic-like frightful, the mind rocks-n-rolls like the ground, which quickly creates a most-unnatural state of incomprehension, as though suffering from some form of dementia — walls jiggle and floors move, doors are pitched at an angle, all behaving extreme-paranormal, and all so fast, in seconds, micro-seconds, tenths of seconds.
In a complete-cranked brain rush, I tried to rapidly figure out first, what the shit? and then what to do about it, though both questions burned themselves rapidly together — it’s been said to get under a table or a door jam, but my immediate and most-greatest desire was to get outside, away from this freakin’-ass-haunted apartment house.
Staggering around, bubbling manic thoughts, I managed to get onto the front porch and into the parking lot, though, the quake continued, seemingly forever, and the sight of my pick-up truck rocking back-and-forth is one of them indelible brain-pix that will be there a long time.
Minutes later, standing in the parking lot, smoking a cigarette with neighbors, looking at my still-slightly trembling hands, I felt shaken but happy, feeling most-fortunate, having escape something big and awesome and scary.
Located 27 miles west of Ferndale, out in the Pacific Ocean, 33 miles west-southwest from Eureka, and less than 45 miles slightly northeast of where I sat on my ass, the 6.5 quake was figured to be about 13.5 miles deep and included some 23 aftershocks, including a small one (2.6) this afternoon, all coming from the same area — three of those were rated 4.0 or better (I did feel a 4.4 about two hours after the main event).
(Illustration found here).
During this episode, I did discover a most-useful site from the US Geological Survey, with even an animated, continually-updated animated map of earthquakes in California and Nevada, found here, which appears like lights flashing around the state.
A natural WTF!
A few seconds so overwhelming it’s nuts.
In a flash, one understands how much of our physical life, and especially this crazy-assed modern version, is outside of our control with a lot shit depending on a lot of factors, some close to home and others from far, far away.
My apartment house survived without an apparent scratch (except for some fingernail-claw marks on the front door) and Northern California got off fairly easy on this particular seismic series of events — one major injury (a broken hip) along with 119 reports of damage estimated at $12.5 million to the city of Eureka.
According to the Sunday Times-Standard:
“On the whole, I think we dodged a bullet,” said State Assemblyman Wesley Chesbro, D-Arcata. “It could have been far, far worse.”
Yes, well.
During the last few weeks I haven’t blogged much, too tired due to a new set of work hours — not too creative in the afternoons or evenings, and after surfing the Net with a thoughtful perusal of the daily new events, I’m way-too mentally skewered to intelligently address anything but a Louis L’Amour novel and sleep.
And there’s so much shit currently occurring it boggles the senses, and despite getting pissed about so much arrogant incompetence controlling the planet, the creative ability to write about it escapes like the scent off an empty cup of yerba mate.
Lack of sleep coupled with continuous bad news on all fronts makes one want to take a nap on the floor.
Or maybe mimic poor Mr. McCroskey barking orders: “I want the kids in bed by nine, the dog fed, the yard watered and the gate locked.”
And everything will be good and happy again.
Leave a Comment‘Seeing’ Face
Monday, December 21st, 2009
Category: Musings, Scratching Sounds
Just as I figured: Computers are intolerant, racially discriminatory and just creepy.
Figuring out African-Americans was a problem for HP’s newest face-recognition gear:
In the video, Wanda (Caucasian) and Desi (African American) — two employees at what appears to be a computer electronics store — expose a flaw in the webcam software.
As depicted, the software has no problem recognizing Wanda’s face, with the webcam following her face around as she moves up, down, in, out and around.
No such luck for Desi, however, as the camera remains completely static regardless of any movement.
The side-by-side portrayal is quite jarring and paints a strong case in favor of Desi’s conjecture: “I think my blackness is interfering with the computer’s ability to follow me,” and assertion that, “Hewlett-Packard computers are racist.”
HP quickly responded, knowing how these things can get out of PR control.
From HP’s Voodoo Blog:
Everything we do is focused on ensuring that we provide a high-quality experience for all our customers, who are ethnically diverse and live and work around the world. That’s why when issues surface, we take them seriously and work hard to understand the root causes.
…
The technology we use is built on standard algorithms that measure the difference in intensity of contrast between the eyes and the upper cheek and nose.
We believe that the camera might have difficulty “seeing” contrast in conditions where there is insufficient foreground lighting.
Eyes speak with forked-robotic tongue.
(Illustration found here).
Leave a CommentPass This On…
Monday, December 21st, 2009
Category: Orwellian, Scratching Sounds
Must-read on the twisted-horror of the US Senate health care bill at FireDogLake.
Politics and the human condition.
Leave a Comment‘Why aren’t they turning?’
Sunday, December 20th, 2009
Category: Cloud gazing
In the midst of bad news from many quarters, this latest does make one feel better.
From Wired:
That asteroid is Apophis, a 900-foot asteroid. Calculations released on Christmas Eve 2004 appeared to show that there was a greater than 2 percent chance the asteroid would hit the Earth in 2029.
The asteroid appeared ready to give the Earth its closest shave since astronomers began looking for such things.
It was judged a 4 on the Torino Impact Hazard Scale for a short time, the highest rating any near-Earth object has received.
…
Even though the asteroid doesn’t look like it’s going to hit Earth, on April 13, 2029, it will come closer to Earth than any other near-Earth object that we know of.
It will pass just 18,300 miles above the planet’s surface.
A comfort, though slight, is the notion the event isn’t loosely-scheduled for another near-30 years.
And with a real-huge shitload of nefarious situations currently facing the planet, to paraphrase George Carlin’s “Hippy Dippy Weatherman,” don’t sweat that piece of space rock coming our way.
(Illustration found here).
Leave a CommentLight-Up a Smoke
Monday, December 14th, 2009
Category: Cloud gazing
Copenhagen: Tempers flared Monday at the United Nations climate summit as poor nations staged a walkout to protest what they called inadequate aid offers from rich countries, and the U.S. and China jockeyed for position.
The talks have become what one observer called a “farce,” as guidelines agreed on two years ago are not even obtainable because these clowns can’t even agree now on the basics — and it’s still about the money.
Developed countries vs those undeveloped — the rich are stalling the not-so-rich: “The disaster has already begun because we have not closed the gap an inch. We have not moved,” a senior Asian negotiator said. “We are just trying to paste over it with political rhetoric.”
(Illustration found here).
While delegates to the conference are playing grab-ass with a planet’s future, the need for some kind of killer agreement to curb/stop greenhouse gases or the days ahead will be a killer time.
Sadly, and mighty depressing is the actual reality — what needs to be done in time to stop/mitigate the horror coming just near-literally around the corner.
Environmental activist Bill McKibben posted a sobering view today at environment360 on the challenge of what’s at stake.
Some snippets:
But here’s the thing: The words don’t count.
None of them. If you want to understand what’s going on here, you need to shut out the words, the drama, the craziness, and just focus on numbers — and really just a few.
Outside the window, right now, the atmosphere contains 390 parts per million (ppm) of CO2.
That’s too much — as a result, sea ice is melting, glaciers retreating, deserts spreading.
Science has told us where we need to go: 350 ppm.
There’s really not much pushback against that number — the UN’s chief climate scientist Rajendra Pachauri has made it clear that it’s a necessary target.
…
So here’s the number at the moment.
Take every plan — the meager American one, the more aggressive European targets, the Chinese promises to use less carbon per yuan of output, the Brazilian pledges about forests, the Maldives hope of going carbon neutral inside a decade. Push the button.
In the year 2100, the atmosphere will contain 770 parts per million CO2.
And even with all this serious science shit, there are still some real-mean-ass, dumb-ass people, like a for instance, Sen. Jim Inhofe, a delusional-type A character who will reportedly travel to Copenhagen to show his US ass-ignorance, even demanding an investigation into “climate-gate” as global warming is a massive, way-complicated fraud: “They’re cooking the science,” Inhofe said. “The same things that came out on these e-mails is what I said four years ago.”
And to this comes a snap-back from US Sen. Barbara Boxer, chair of the Environment and Public Works Committee: “Well, my good friend Sen. Inhofe is entitled to his opinion, but he’s not entitled to his own facts.”
Words not numbers — a match waiting…
Leave a CommentAnoxic Anxiety
Sunday, December 13th, 2009
Category: Cloud gazing, Scratching Sounds
Nearly in a near-panic.
Wikipedia: Oceanic anoxic events or anoxic events occur when the Earth’s oceans become completely depleted of oxygen (O2) below the surface levels.
Although anoxic events have not happened for millions of years, the geological record shows that they happened many times in the past.
Anoxic events may have caused mass extinctions.
These mass extinctions were so characteristic they include some of those which geobiologists employ to serve as a time marker in biostratigraphic dating.
It is believed oceanic anoxic events are strongly linked to lapses in key oceanic current circulations, to climate warming and greenhouse gases.
(Illustration: ‘Manatee In The Sea Grass‘ by Joann Shular found here).
Meanwhile, in Copenhagen: The Associated Press reports that the protests — which attracted 40,000 to 100,000 people, depending on the source — were “mostly peaceful.”
Peoples from 194 nations are meeting under the UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change and despite all the hub-bub outside on the streets, early reports indicate not much has been accomplished other than the rich are still being assholes.
Also reportedly this week the climate talks will become dramatic as more activists and a shitload of world leaders (President Obama is scheduled for Friday — closing day), US congress-people, journalists and all kinds of other types will be trying to take up space at the conference.
And drama kicked-off today — climate science is serious as a heart-attack.
From DeSmogBlog:
During a live primetime climate-debate broadcasted on Danish national TV one of the participators, climate-skeptic scientist Henrik Svensmark, had a heart attack.
Bjorn Lomborg was by his side in the tv-studio when the scientist mid-sentence fell ill.
THe 41 year old Henrik Svensmark made an awkward spasm/shudder and burst out a strange noise, sounding like a cough.
The other participants in the debate looked baffled and he mumbled:
“It’s my heart,” and fell to the ground and the pacemaker kicked in once more and you could hear him scream. Bjrøn Lomborg yelled “call an ambulance, call an ambulance” and the host and the other participants came over to help the man.
Svensmark is supposedly one of the “sunspots and cosmic rays, not humans, cause global warming” kind of guys — a point reportedly refuted by the science.
And along with global warming, the “evil twin of climate change” – ocean acidification — is apparently getting worse as a report released to the conference implied, although the CO2-related phenomenon doesn’t get much press.
The study from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) paints another bleak picture for the earth’s environment.
From the UK’s The Guardian on the report:
Ocean acidification — the facts says that acidity in the seas has increased 30% since the start of the industrial revolution.
Many of the effects of this acidification are already irreversible and are expected to accelerate, according to the scientists.
…
Although oceans have acidified naturally in the past, the current rate of acidification is so fast that it is becoming extremely difficult for species and habitats to adapt.
“We’re counting it in decades, and that’s the real take-home message,” said Dr John Baxter a senior scientist with Scottish Natural Heritage, and the report’s co-author. “This is happening fast.”
The report, published by the EU-funded European Project on Ocean Acidification, a consortium of 27 research institutes and environment agencies, states that the survival of a number of marine species is affected or threatened, in ways not recognised and understood until now.
And also from the UK and today’s timesonline:
Ocean acidification has been quite scandalously left out of the reckoning in the past few weeks.
I am not for a moment belittling the science behind man-made global warming. This still seems to me solid, despite the shenanigans at the University of East Anglia (“climategate”).
That levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are rising is not disputed. We have known since the 19th century that carbon dioxide was a crucial greenhouse gas. Venus has a lot of it and is hot as hell. Mars has almost none and is cold as ice.
…
Since the beginning of the industrial revolution in about 1750, sea water acidity has increased by 30%.
The speed and degree of this change are faster than anything that had happened for 55m years.
The changes being observed are beginning to disrupt the ability of any organism to make shells out of calcium carbonate.
Organisms that do this include corals, crabs, lobsters, small creatures vital to the diet of fish and plankton of the kind that die and form chalk deposits such as the white cliffs of Dover.
Projections show that by 2060, given the current rate of fossil-fuel emissions, sea water acidity could have increased by 120%.
…
Such an effect could trigger a chain of reactions through entire ecosystems, from whales to fish and shellfish, with huge implications for economies and wildlife.
It could even stop the sea absorbing as much carbon dioxide as it does now, accelerating global warming.
It is pretty scary stuff.
Yes.
In a hearing Dec. 2, Dr. Jane Lubchenco, administrator of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), testified before the Senate Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming about seawater acidity and it’s consequences, which is also pretty scary stuff.
Read a comprehensive look at the current state of ocean acidification here.
Time to do something appears to have been yesterday.
Leave a CommentIntense Irony
Saturday, December 12th, 2009
Category: Orwellian, War & Politics
One really mind-boggling particular nowadays is the continual use of hypocritical-irony; creating a two-faced lie through the clenched-teeth of a smile.
Verbal irony is distinguished from situational irony and dramatic irony in that it is produced intentionally by speakers.
For instance, if a speaker exclaims, “I’m not upset!” but reveals an upset emotional state through their voice while truly trying to claim they’re not upset, it would not be verbal irony by virtue of its verbal manifestation (it would, however, be situational irony).
But if the same speaker said the same words and intended to communicate that they were upset by claiming they were not, the utterance would be verbal irony.
This distinction gets at an important aspect of verbal irony: speakers communicate implied propositions that are intentionally contradictory to the propositions contained in the words themselves.
There are examples of verbal irony that do not rely on saying the opposite of what one means, and there are cases where all the traditional criteria of irony exist and the utterance is not ironic.
We’re living and walking around in an age of horrifying and catastrophic irony.
A terrible case in point: Nimble-minded George Jr. arrogantly blubbered to a joint session of Congress on Sept. 20, 2001:
Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there.
It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.
And the irony of it all:
Americans are asking “Why do they hate us?”
They hate what they see right here in this chamber: a democratically elected government. Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms: our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.
(Illustration found here).
The then-spawned The Global War on Terror coupled with the creation of the huge, bungling Department of Homeland Security reproduced what it supposedly sought to eradicate — an example would best be described in the old reflective-adage of pouring JP4 jet fuel on a small, charcoal brazier in order to smother the fire.
This morning from Al Jazeera English:
Extremists held in a US-run detention centre in Iraq were allowed to teach fellow detainees how to use explosives and become suicide bombers, a former inmate has told Al Jazeera.
Adel Jasim Mohammed, a former detainee of Camp Bucca near Umm Qasr, said that US officials did nothing to stop radicals from indoctrinating young detainees at the camp.
“Extremists had freedom to educate the young detainees. I saw them giving courses using classroom boards on how to use explosives, weapons and how to become suicide bombers,” Mohammed said.
“For the Americans we felt it was normal. They did not stop them [the radicals].”
Adel, who was held for four years without charge at Camp Bucca, said that extremists were allowed to speak freely to fellow inmates.
“In 2005, an extremist was sent to our camp. At first, Sunnis and Shias rejected his teachings. But we were told that he was imposed by the prison authority,” he said.
“He stayed for a week and recruited 25 of the 34 detainees – they became extremists like him.”
And those five young, naive Americans arrested last week week in Pakistan has created a good scare about homegrown jihad, and the fabled wide, wide world-war on terror has doubled back on itself, feeding off its own entrails, as it were, to make matters far, far worse.
Those lost souls from Virginia were nabbed only after one of the guys’ daddy, Khalid Farooq, called authorities — and after his son and the others were arrested, and just to be on the safe-terror side: Police said they’d also detained Khalid Farooq as a precautionary measure.
One never knows the mystery of jihad.
Read a good view on the mythology of the US-led terror war here.
And this past week, the current US president, Barack Obama, reached far into the cosmic-ironic heavens to pluck a few words to whitewash the total-irony of being both a Nobel peace-prize winner and a war escalator.
(Illustration found here).
Although Obama claimed he was “most surprised and deeply humbled” by the Nobel prize in October, he popped some hawkish-spin into the peace mix last week in Oslo, Norway:
We must begin by acknowledging the hard truth that we will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. There will be times when nations — acting individually or in concert — will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified.
…
But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their (Gandhi and King) examples alone.
I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people.
For make no mistake: evil does exist in the world.
A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies.
Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms.
To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism — it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.
But what about change?
And what about reality vs bullshit?
A situation stated best via a letter to the editor, published Friday in the New York Times: The Nobel Peace Prize only underscores the irony and sadness of President Obama’s Afghanistan policy. On that memorable night a year ago, in Grant Park in Chicago, before an impressed and stunned nation and world, Mr. Obama promised that change would come to America.
Obama, therefore, has produced verbal irony using both the situational and dramatic ironies — Pain is just weakness leaving the body!
Another Gone
Thursday, December 10th, 2009
Category: Media, Musings
Highlights the desperate plight of news gathering: Editor&Publisher, an authentic cornerstone of journalism will cease publication at the end of this year.
The announcement was made Thursday on its online site.
An interview today with Greg Mitchell, E&P’s editor since 2002, on the demise of the newspaper-trade industry/journo-icon can be found at Columbia Journalism Review.
Read a brief Wikipedia-history of E&P here — the magazine was founded in 1901 and six years later merged with a magazine most-aptly called, The Journalist.
And for reaction from the media here.
Sad state of affairs, that it be.
Leave a CommentHeadin’ to Helmand
Monday, November 30th, 2009
Category: Madness, War & Politics
From President Obama’s lips to boots on the ground.
Word came Sunday night: Escalation — 35,000 more troops for the Afghan meat-grinder.
And the first batch, 9,000 Marines for Helmand province, will leave as soon as Obama opens his mouth Tuesday at West Point, an event creating a most-strange and ironic circumstance for a snow-job — He will try and somehow explain to US peoples why such a bloody, dumb-ass move makes sense.
(Illustration found here).
A poem from Jean Gerard, age 94: “Defragging Afghanistan”
Take Showkar Kariz for example.
It’s thirty miles northeast of Kandahar
as the crow flies over Mohammed Qasim’s head.
He’s the only remaining inhabitant now.
He looks up into a cloudless sky.“There’s no Al Quaeda here,” says he.
“I had just dug out a child when
the second strike flew over. That time
they got him!”
He squints in the sun,
rubs his eyes.
“These are war crimes,” he says.
Silence.
Then: “Guess who came by last week,
and for what? Americans,” he says.
He’s tired. His voice shakes. “They
buried a piece of the World Trade Center
here,” he says, “and took a piece
of our mosque back to New York.”
He points
to a small mound beside a ruined wall,
sifts a handful of dust through his fingers.
Bad moon rising, and so forth…
Leave a Comment’scrabbling for the smoking gun…’
Saturday, November 28th, 2009
Category: Scratching Sounds
Some serious shit: “Tony Blair and George Bush at Camp David in February 2001 where they discovered they both used Colgate toothpaste.”
And they loved war games, much to the peril of the planet.
These two terrifying clowns are together again — part-and-parcel of an UK inquiry into British shenanigans in the US-led nefarious run-up to the Iraq war.
Despite some nasty, back-stabbing testimony this week, news of the hearings have been downplayed in the US, if reported at all.
(Illustration found here).
On Thursday, the former British ambassador to Washington related how so intense the preparations for the invasion (in early 2002), the UN weapons inspectors couldn’t do the proper job and were forced to find evidence, any kind of evidence:
Sir Christopher Meyer said the “unforgiving nature” of the build-up after American forces had been told to prepare for war meant that “we found ourselves scrabbling for the smoking gun”.
He added: “It was another way of saying ‘it’s not that Saddam has to prove that he’s innocent, we’ve now bloody well got to try and prove he’s guilty.’
And we — the Americans, the British — have never really recovered from that because of course there was no smoking gun.”
…
Asked about Tony Blair’s meeting with Bush at Crawford, Texas, in April 2002, where, some observers believe, the decision to go to war was made, Meyer said: “To this day I’m not entirely clear what degree of convergence was signed in blood at the Texas range.”
…
On 9/11 Condoleezza Rice, then the US national security adviser, told Meyer she was in “no doubt: it was an al-Qaida operation.”
The following weekend Bush and his key advisers met at Camp David and contacts later told Meyer there had been a “big ding-dong” about Iraq and Saddam.
And Meyer expressed the idea Margaret Thatcher would have done a better job than Twisted-Tony Blair:
Sir Christopher said that he was “not making a party political point,” but Lady Thatcher had been much tougher on the “special relationship” with the Americans.
He expressed frustration over the failure of the allies to agree a diplomatic strategy to overthrow Saddam or to prepare properly for victory, which would have prevented the country’s descent into chaos.
“Quite often I think what would Margaret Thatcher have done,” Sir Christopher told the inquiry.
“I think she would have insisted on a clear, coherent political-diplomatic strategy. I think she would have demanded the greatest clarity about what the heck happened if, and when, we removed Saddam Hussein.”
And the ever-so-delightful Dick Cheney:
“I remember saying to London ‘This may be the most powerful Vice-President ever.’
I mean, his institutional opposite number was the Deputy Prime Minister,” said Sir Christopher. “This was an unbalanced relationship and probably didn’t reap the dividends that we might have expected.”
And on Wednesday, senior officials within UK’s Foreign Office told the inquiry Iraq’s WMD was known to be non-existent, even early on in pre-war planning:
The inquiry was told how officials within the Foreign Office had become convinced that the regime in Baghdad was developing chemical and biological weapons.
When it received intelligence contradicting the claim in March 2003, this was discounted.
“There was contradictory intelligence, so I don’t think it invalidated the point about what weapons [Saddam] had,” Sir William (Ehrman, a senior official within the Foreign Office) said. “It was more about their use. Even if they were disassembled the [chemical or biological] agents still existed.”
It also emerged that a secret paper drawn up in the summer of 2002, which pointed to Iraq as a potential threat, was based almost entirely on uncorroborated and outdated assumptions.
Tim Dowse, the former head of counter-proliferation at the Foreign Office, said the document was based on information obtained before weapons inspectors were thrown out of the country in 1998.
“We had got ourselves in a particular mindset,” Mr Dowse said.
Nevertheless, there were repeated warnings to ministers about the reliability of the intelligence on Iraq.
In April 2000, intelligence was said to be “limited to chemical weapons.”
By May 2001, knowledge of major weapons programmes was described as “patchy;” by March 2002 it was “sporadic and patchy.”
Advisers admitted in August they knew “very little” about Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons, while intelligence information “remained limited” by September.
In June 2008, the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released its report: “Before taking the country to war, this Administration owed it to the American people to give them a 100 percent accurate picture of the threat we faced. Unfortunately, our Committee has concluded that the Administration made significant claims that were not supported by the intelligence,” (chairman of the Committee John D.) Rockefeller said. “In making the case for war, the Administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent. As a result, the American people were led to believe that the threat from Iraq was much greater than actually existed.”
Meanwhile back at the UK hearings last week, Jeremy Greenstock, the Brit’s former ambassador to the UN, testified George Jr. was “hell bent on the use of force” in Iraq and was not going to be stymied:
As diplomats frantically attempted in early 2003 to agree upon a U.N. resolution approving a military offensive, Bush’s key aides grew impatient — criticizing the process as an unnecessary distraction, he said.
Grumbling from Washington “included noises about ‘this is a waste of time, what we need is regime change, why are we bothering with this, we must sweep this aside and do what’s going to have to be done anyway — and deal with this with the use of force,’” Greenstock testified before the inquiry into the Iraq war.
And on the Crawford, Texas, pow-wow between George Jr. and Twisted-Tony, there was this:
Greenstock said following the Crawford meeting, he realized Britain “was being drawn into quite a different discussion.”
But, like Meyer, he said the talks were secretive and the conversation between the two leaders was not disclosed to officials.
Read more on the inquiry here and here.
And read about what end the inquiry — according to the UK’s Independent, which will be nothing except some good headlines (in the UK, of course, not the US) and another whitewash.
A shame and disgrace that such public hearings won’t be held in the US as President Obama has made it fairly clear there won’t be any Iraq-war criminal investigations, despite all indications to the contrary.
From the Center for Public Integrity in January 2008:
President George W. Bush and seven of his administration’s top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
Nearly five years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, an exhaustive examination of the record shows that the statements were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.
People should be scrabbling for a real-life legal gun.
Leave a CommentQuick Punch
Monday, November 23rd, 2009
Category: Cloud gazing
(Illustration found here).
A new satellite-based study published Sunday in Nature Geoscience indicates the supposedly more-stable East Antarctic ice sheet has as been losing 57 billion tons of ice bulk a year since 2006.
From the BBC on the report:
“We felt surprised to see this change in East Antarctica,” study leader Jianli Chen from the Centre for Space Research at the University of Texas in Austin told BBC News.
The loss still looks small by contrast with West Antarctica, which is losing 132Gt (tons) per year, and with Greenland, where a recent analysis combining Grace data with other measurements indicated an annual figure of 273Gt.
(h/t Climate Progress).
Another brick in the wall of weird.
Also published Sunday in the Energy Bulletin:
The trouble with apocalypse is that most people have already seen it at the movie theater, watched it on television, read it in a book, or heard all about it from the pulpit.
So inundated with the language of crisis are we that we have become immune to it.
From the perspective of the historian our age has been chock full of “great transformations.”
And, it is, after all, the historian’s business to write about great change even if he or she has to invent some.
…
What apocalyptic narratives do is elevate the importance of the trajectory of every person’s life regardless of his or her station in society.
If we’re all in this together, then we can share in a great destiny no matter who we are.
But destiny sounds like fate.
What can one do if one is headed toward a great apocalypse? Pray, perhaps. Repent, maybe.
But responding to such a gargantuan event calls more for attaining the right relationship with one’s god than engaging in constructive social and political action.
Punch line: Don’t mothball the tuxedo!
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