Toe-Heeled America
Filed Under Media, Musings | Leave a Comment
Interview of Seymour Hersh by Arabic daily, Asharq Al-Awsat, via AlterNet:
- I really believe something happened to America; after 9/11 we became a different country.
That is fine, presidents sometimes might want to do that, but my issue is how did Bush do it?
How did he beat the press?
How did he beat the military and Congress and turn everyone into a coward?
Why didn’t people stand up to him in this situation?
In other words, how fragile is the American constitution; it turns out that it is much more fragile than people think.
These are the questions.
Hersh was explaining how after Bush leaves office people might open up.
(Illustration found here).
And on journalism in the US:
- In America, it is collapsing.
Economically it’s a disaster.
I have an easy fix for the problems regarding reporting in America; I would get rid of 70 per cent of the editors.
You see it is always the more cautious people that get promoted and the more aggressive people who do not because they are harder to control.
Above and beyond that, the newspapers have been very slow in coping with the internet and we are dying.
One of the great things in America is the first amendment; we can publish any top secret document we can get, there is nothing like that in Britain or anywhere else.
Let us assume I obtain some highly sensitive material, It is my call whether to publish it or not. Of course, one wouldn’t want to jeopardize his colleagues or fellow Americans etc, but what I am saying is that we are failing despite this incredible press freedom.
Hersh is right.
In a new survey by Washington-based Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, the Internet has surpassed newspapers for news.
Via RawStory:
- Forty percent said they get most of their news from the Internet, up from 24 percent in September 2007, and more than the 35 percent who cited newspapers as their main news source.
TV is still the top dog for most Americans:
- Seventy percent of the 1,489 people surveyed by Pew said television is their primary source for national and international news.
TV my ass, which leaves US peoples as ignorant as ever.
Oil Gone
Filed Under Media, Musings | Leave a Comment
Life as we know it is coming to a quick, sure end.
A story this morning is disturbing:
- So burn this into your mind: between 2007 and 2008 the IEA (International Energy Agency) radically changed its assessment.
Until this year’s report, the agency mocked people who said that oil supplies might peak.
In the foreword to a book it published in 2005, its executive director, Claude Mandil, dismissed those who warned of this event as “doomsayers.”
Wrong!
The IEA apparently has the right to change its mind, especially if the facts present themselves.
And the world will be different very shortly.
(Illustration found here).
Now the shoe is on the other foot (sorry can’t help it):
- In its 2007 World Energy Outlook, the IEA predicted a rate of decline in output from the world’s existing oilfields of 3.7 percent a year.
This, it said, presented a short-term challenge, with the possibility of a temporary supply crunch in 2015, but with sufficient investment any shortfall could be covered.
But the new report, published last month, carried a very different message: a projected rate of decline of 6.7 percent, which means a much greater gap to fill.
…
More importantly, in the 2008 report the IEA suggests for the first time that world petroleum supplies might hit the buffers.
“Although global oil production in total is not expected to peak before 2030, production of conventional oil … is projected to level off towards the end of the projection period.”
These bland words reveal a major shift.
Never before has one of the IEA’s energy outlooks forecast the peaking or plateauing of the world’s conventional oil production (which is what we mean when we talk about peak oil).
…
“In terms of non-OPEC [countries outside the big oil producers' cartel]“, he (Fatih Birol, the lead author of the new energy outlook) replied, “we are expecting that in three, four years’ time the production of conventional oil will come to a plateau, and start to decline. … In terms of the global picture, assuming that OPEC will invest in a timely manner, global conventional oil can still continue, but we still expect that it will come around 2020 to a plateau as well, which is of course not good news from a global oil supply point of view.”
Read all of this interesting piece at AlterNet.
Oil, oil, bye-bye!
Taliban Taunt — ‘Bring ‘em On’
Filed Under War & Politics | Leave a Comment
A war that just keeps on giving, and in lieu of current events, now the shoe could be on the other foot.
Five years ago, Decider George blubbered bring ‘em on like his ass was actually on the line — a big mouth that killed a lot of people.
Now Mullah Omar and his Taliban have regrouped their balls to also taunt out a dare, but in what could be some nasty real time.
(Illustration found here).
Two years prior to the baiting outburst, an expression he now regrets (see video here), the US invaded Afghanistan in hurried pursuit of Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda crowd, being in protective care of the Omar’s Taliban.
Although supposedly the Taliban was routed late 2001 and a new government installed in Kabul, the entire operation was placed on the back burner while Decider George invaded Iraq, a move worse than worse.
Now seven years later, the Afghan war is going to shit and even a reported surge of some 30,000 more US troops hasn’t deterred Omar.
From Agence France-Presse last week:
- “They now want to send more troops to Afghanistan…. The Russians also sent that many troops but were badly defeated,” said the spokesman, Yousuf Ahmadi, referring to Moscow’s doomed decade-long occupation of Afghanistan.
“When the US increases its troop levels to that of the Russians, they will also be cruelly defeated,” warned Ahmadi, who claims to speak on behalf of fugitive Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar.
“More troops — that means there will be more targets for the Taliban,” he said by telephone from an unknown location.
And from antiwar.com:
- “The current armed clashes, which now number into tens, will spiral up to hundred of armed clashes. Your current casualties of hundreds will jack up to thousand casualties of dead and injured,” said the statement, which was written in broken English and posted on a Web site Sunday that has previously carried militant messages.
…
In his statement, Omar also called on those Afghans who fought against Soviet troops in the 1980s to abandon their government jobs and join the ranks of the Taliban.
He also said that the idea of creating tribal militias in order to fight the Taliban and other insurgent groups in the country will not work.
“No Afghan will lower himself to such an irrational and insensitive position to fight against his own brothers for the interests of the invaders and lose his life and faith for … the pleasure of the invaders,” the statement said.
And WireDispatch:
- “Reconsider your wrong decision of wrong occupation, and seek a safe exit to withdraw your forces,” said the message, which the Taliban said came from Omar.
“If you leave our lands, we can arrange for you a reasonable opportunity for your departure,” he said, adding that the Taliban posed no harm to anyone in the world.
If the occupation persisted, “you will be defeated in all parts of the world … like the former Soviet Union”, Omar said.
The boy’s got guff.
A commentary in GulfNews yesterday noted not only a stronger Taliban, but a revival of al-Qaeda as well.
- Al Qaida, having regrouped and expanded in Iraq, was wrong-footed by General David Petraeus’ ‘surge’ and ‘awakening’ campaigns. Now battle-hardened and well trained fighters are migrating back to the organisation’s former safe haven in Afghanistan where they are protected by a resurgent Taliban, who control two-thirds of the country.
The renewed significance of Afghanistan in Al Qaida’s global jihad prospectus is signalled by the arrival there of ‘top brass’ leaders such as the former emir, Abu Ayoob Al Masri, whom many believed captured or killed in May 2008 but who resurfaced in the tribal area in the summer.
(Illustration found here).
The GulfNews column, written by Abdel Bari Atwan, Editor-in-chief of Al Quds Al Arabi pan-Arab daily newspaper, takes the position of history.
- Invasions of Afghanistan are doomed to failure by several insurmountable factors.
The terrain is extremely mountainous and hostile, familiar to the insurgents but impenetrable by outside forces — exactly the scenario that allowed Algeria’s National Liberation Front to defeat the French in 1962.
The indigenous population is equally hostile and the majority Pashtun are notoriously fierce, bloodthirsty warriors who have a history of setting aside their tribal differences to create a united force to repel invaders.
…
Let us look at the Soviet experience a little closer: The Red Army invaded in 1979 and established a puppet regime (first, in 1980, under Karmal then, in 1986, under Najibullah); they faced the unexpected and rapid formation of a hugely successful insurgency composed of international Mujaheddin which dragged them into a prolonged war of attrition; the Soviet economy, and empire, crumbled under the pressure of unmanageable military and security costs.
Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar have been there before.
The world has been there before, except the present situation sees the additional challenge to the current invaders, US-led Nato, of the insurgency’s rapid spread into Pakistan.
As long ago as 1996, when I interviewed him in Tora Bora, Bin Laden told me that his strategy was to “bleed the US to the point of bankruptcy” with prolonged wars of attrition on several fronts.
…
For two centuries, Afghanistan has been the graveyard of imperialist ambition.
As the US and British economy face meltdown, are Obama and (UK’s Gordon) Brown really in any position to change history?
Yes, the big question.
‘Two Feet in One Shoe’ or A Cordwainer’s Delight
Filed Under Media, Musings | Leave a Comment
Bloomberg reported Friday a certain Turkish shoe is flying off the shelf (h/t TPM):
- Baydan has received orders for 300,000 pairs of the shoes since the attack, more than four times the number his company sold each year since the model was introduced in 1999.
…
“We’ve been selling these shoes for years but, thanks to Bush, orders are flying in like crazy,” he said. “We’ve even hired an agency to look at television advertising.”
(Illustration of Armen Eloyan‘s ‘Two Feet In One Shoe’ found here).
The shoe maker, Baydan Ayakkabicilik San. & Tic., is based in Istanbul and markets the brown, thick-soled “Model 271,” the type used by Iraqi journalist Muntadar al-Zeidi to try and pop Decider George in the face last week — he missed — all over including Iraq, Iran, Syria and Egypt.
Just from Iraq, 120,000 of the shoes were ordered last week.
Ramazan Baydan, who owns the company, said the model may soon be renamed “The Bush Shoe” or “Bye-Bye Bush.”
Sounds about right.
Al-Zaidi reportedly has said I’m sorry to Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, but not to Decider George:
- “In a letter to Iraqi prime minister, Muntadhar al-Zaidi has only apologized to Nuri al-Maliki himself,” Fardanews reported, citing comments by an Iraqi source familiar with the case.
“He said that he felt no remorse for throwing his shoes at the ‘Great Satan’, George Bush, and added that he would repeat his actions if he sees him again, because Bush’s forces have killed many of Iraq’s children,” added the source.
…
The official also said that in a written statement to the judge, al-Zaidi had said that he expected to be killed by the Bush’s body guards after hurling the first shoe.
“It seemed that his bodyguards were not on full alert at the time, that was how I managed to throw the second shoe,” the official quoted al-Zaidi as saying.
Shoe tossing is apparently more than meets the eye.
Memory
Filed Under Media, Musings | Leave a Comment
During the daily US State Department press briefing Thursday, Sean McCormack said the infamous shoe-throwing incident last weekend will be eclipsed by other more-important shit 50 years from now.
An image, though, for pure foolish failure: A shoe-gram for the last eight years.
(Illustration found here).
Also a pure snapshot of twisted, historical logic. (h/t: ThinkProgress).
- McCormack: Well, look, you guys make decisions about what you cover.
I suspect — just a guess — that three, four, five, ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years from now that the fact of the President making that visit under those circumstances will probably overshadow any memory of this particular gentleman and what he did.
Q: That’s a pretty – that’s a pretty interesting prediction.
McCormack: Come back to me in 50 years; we can talk about it.
Q: Would you care to bet? (Laughter.)
McCormack: Try and collect on it 50 years from now. (Laughter.)
Although Muntadar al-Zaidi’s attempt to knock Decider George out of the box is really, really funny, the actual reality of the man and the entire Iraq affair is way-more than deadly serious.
And we’re not talking about 50 years from now, but in the right here and now.
In a Pew Research survey published Thursday nailed Decider George with shoe-leathered distaste:
- Nearly two-thirds (64%) say his administration will be remembered more for its failures than its accomplishments, and a plurality (34%) says Bush will go down in history as a poor president.
Fully 68% say they disapprove of Bush’s performance and most of those — 53% of the public — say they disapprove strongly.
That is the highest rate of strong disapproval measured by Pew surveys in Bush’s eight years in office.
If one looks hard at the stills/video of the shoe incident, Decider George and Iraq Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki appear like a couple of Marx Brothers, or a couple of dudes involved in a Laurel and Hardy routine, while at the same time, the whole episode seems a dream, not really happening, and Decider George isn’t ducking, and then ducking again — that flat, dumb-ass expression on his face — and we wait for the little, ‘That’s All Folks,’ to end an eight-year horror-tune.
If the one shit fits, try the other for size.