WhirledView

John Bolton, Donald Rumsfeld and the C-Word

By PLS

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was in Iraq this past week. The surprising theme of his visit was the c-word. That’s compromise, which has been a very dirty word describing an almost obscene concept for the current regime in Washington.

Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds are having a hard time deciding on how to define federalism. They’re also at odds over the issue of whether to treat adult women as fully empowered citizens or as chattels, the latter justified as usual by resort to religious texts.

Rumsfeld was pushing the Bush notion of a united, democratic Iraq, the achievement of which, on paper anyway, is critical to the administration’s less and less popular project of reforming Iraq. The administration is worried that the constitution writers in Bagdad will end up by replacing the Saddam Hussein version of a unified Iraq with something closer to chaos than confederation.

So there was bullheaded Donald Rumsfeld, caught on videocam, scolding his recalcitrant clients: “It’s time for compromise. That’s what politics is all about.”

The Yogis of Tibet: A Film

By PLS

This film, fortunately, doesn’t deliver what it promises. Here’s the hype:

Since the invasion of Tibet over 50 years ago, China has systematically destroyed Tibetan culture. One of the most profound losses is the tradition of the great master yogis. The entire system which supported these fascinating mind masters has been inexorably eliminated.

In order to record these mystical practitioners for posterity, the film makers were given permission to film heretofore secret demonstrations and to conduct interviews of subject matter rarely discussed.

This profound historical, spiritual and educational film will someday be the last remnant of these amazing practitioners.

And so a really dangerous promise ends with a ludicrous claim the film itself undermines.

Let’s begin with the hype: Step right up and buy your ticket (or your DVD) now! Mystical secrets, preserved here for all time, about to be divulged!

It Must Be Catching

by CKR

Britain is about to embark on the kind of non-debate the US is having on nuclear policy.

They're going to spend £1 billion (about $1.8 billion) on upgrading the Trident weapons facility at Aldermaston.

At present, over 80% of the infrastructure at AWE pre-dates 1960 and it is becoming increasingly difficult and expensive to sustain. The package will enable AWE to take forward a program of work aimed at sustaining key skills in the AWE workforce and modernizing some of its core research and manufacturing facilities, including the provision of some extra supporting infrastructure. Defense Industry Daily

Sounds like Los Alamos, even down to the problems.

And Robin Cook weighs in. He makes a number of good points that apply to the US nuclear program too.

Assumptions

by CKR

When I travel, I bring some of my magazine backlog. One on this trip was the April Harper’s Magazine. Erik Reece wrote the big centerfold essay, Death of a Mountain. I liked the premise when the magazine arrived: observe an Appalachian mountain over the year in which it is deconstructed by coal mining. I was undecided about writing a post on it until Phila wrote about an article in the NYT that irritated me in the same way.

Some things look different when you have to wonder if you should drink what comes out of the tap or buy bottled water, especially when the only thing available in bottled water is a carbonated mineral water that tastes strange the second day. When that kind of common assumption is challenged.

Reece is writing in a genre that’s been around for a long time, since Aldo Leopold at least. It’s hard to say anything new, and he doesn’t.

Seeing is believing: Nixon, Khrushchev and the Magic of American Exhibits

By PHK

“Better to see once, than hear a hundred times,” – an Old Russian Proverb

Last Sunday, the New York Times “On this Day” in history featured its July 24, 1959 report from Moscow entitled “Nixon and Khrushchev argue in public as U.S. exhibit opens; accuse each other of threats.” This front page, top of the right hand column story (now in the pay for view only archive) was written by the Times’ then gray haired, veteran Soviet correspondent Harrison Salisbury. The famous “debate,” of course, occurred at the height of the Cold War. It also took place in a model American kitchen that was a part of the much larger American National exhibition, the first ever on display in the Soviet Union where it debuted in Moscow’s large Sokolniki Park and where twenty years later my then three year old would occasionally play.

The American National Exhibition, the 22 others that followed, and the young Russian speaking American exhibit guides who tended those exhibits and their thousands of visitors became stars in their own right. This was one of the few ways the U.S. had to reach the internationally isolated Soviet public – but it was amazingly effective.

This was the time when our small Embassy staff was largely confined inside Moscow’s outer ring road. But our exhibits traveled off the beaten path – to places like Ufa, Novosibirsk, Rostov, Tashkent, Baku and Kishinev (now Chisenau, Moldova). These exhibits about American life and American people made millions of American friends. They made friends because Soviets, for the first time, had the opportunity to meet Americans and see for themselves how we lived. On a personal level, Soviets and Americans often got along very well - even in the worst of times.

Wednesday (Oops!) Volcano Blogging

by CKR

I usually do this kind of thing on Tuesdays, but yesterday just got away from me.

Kamchatka has 29 active volcanoes in its 900-kilometer length. We visited several of the volcanic areas and flew over others. We were told at the Institute of Vulcanology that Kamchatka has several types of volcanoes, both andesitic volcanoes that result from subduction of the earth's crust and stratovolcanoes that have other causes. Look at the map: you'll see that a deep trench in the ocean parallels Kamchatka's eastern coast. That's where oceanic crust is being drawn under Kamchatka.

This is the Valley of the Geysers in Kronotsky Reserve. It was discovered only in 1941. Great flowers as well as geysers like Yellowstone's, and we even saw a grizzly bear munching on Herculaneum, a wonderful gigantic plant that I failed to get photos of. It was one of those things that is so pervasive that I took it for granted. Have to go back, I guess.

Tortured Logic at the Pentagon

By PLS

The Pentagon has a bunch of pictures of “detainees” being abused at American run “detention centers” aka prisons for “enemy combatants.” These photos are worse than the shocking, now familiar batch from Abu Graib evidently. They are so awful that the Pentagon refuses to release them under a Freedom of Information request from the ACLU.

“It’s a privacy thing,” the Pentagon explains. “We don’t want to violate the privacy of the prisoners. Above all, we don’t want to violate the Geneva Conventions on abusing the privacy of prisoners.”

Whoops! This administration continues to insist that the Geneva Conventions apply only to “prisoners of war” and not to “enemy combatants.”

John Roberts Blew It

By PLS

As Whirledview readers know, I wanted to give him space to prove himself worthy of the nomination. He had a chance to be forthright, to establish his trustworthiness. He muffed it.

The equivocation about what “being a member means” disturbs me more than any membership in the Federalist Society could.

The equivocation about whether he “paid dues” or was just a deadbeat somehow tagged as a leader by the Society is truly outrageous.

Talk about the worst sort of weaseling waffling legalistic hairsplitting!