WhirledView

Name calling won’t make America safer, W

By PHK

Here we go again: the Bush administration’s almost instantaneous reaction to attempt to capitalize on what it knows best – igniting yet another round of the “war on terror” scare in its continual battle for "the hearts and minds" of US voters. This is the first time, however, that I recall hearing W refer to suspected Islamic militants as “Islamic fascists.” Doesn't this latest bit of counterproductive name-calling come straight from Israeli and neocon playbooks? Doubtful Condi or the State Department wrote the statement that contains that phrase. Bet they never saw it. Somehow I don’t think the "Islamic fascist" label - whatever it means - plays well among Muslims here and abroad or among many Europeans – but then W has made it patently clear since before March 2003 what he thinks of both.

Our public diplomacy Czarina Karen Hughes’ ideas notwithstanding, America's poor image and other problems among the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims will not be improved through setting up overseas English language summer camps or any of the other public diplomacy quarter-measures this administration has dreamt up since 9/11 but also grossly under funded. W's latest outburst will just make Hughes' task of selling America to the Muslim world all that more difficult.

A Scientific Breakthrough: The Laws of Chemistry May Be Different in Britain and the US! - Updated Twice 8/13/06

by CKR

It’s not often that an international crisis uncovers new scientific understanding, but we may be witnessing just that in the unfolding story of the plot to blow up airplanes over the Atlantic.

The evidence is in the form of newsquotes from British explosives experts.

The Guardian:

"You could carry an inert liquid that if you mix with another one could become explosive," said David Hill, a former counter-terrorism expert at the National Crime Squad and a security consultant at Red24.

"You could get the materials to make a bomb from a garden centre. Or it could be something as simple as taking on board paraffin and attempting to start a fire."

No Longer Waiting

by CKR

Had Samuel Beckett lived, he would be a hundred years old this year. He didn’t, but there is much writing about him and staging of his plays. One suspects that Beckett would have shunned this.

Beckett was existential rather than political. He reflected a feeling that writing and meaning had reached an end, but he found it necessary to go on. He began writing in the 1930s, as Hitler was rising in Germany and the futility of the Great War was still felt. Shortly after the sequel to that war, he wrote “Waiting for Godot.”

The two tramps Vladimir and Estragon wait for something, despite the destruction the world outside the play has wreaked. Godot is the name of whom or what they are waiting for. An interlude gives us Lucky, flogged by Pozzo, whom all of us have known in multiple guises.

This Society Is Even Sicker than I Thought

By PLS

Over the past year or so, in a spirit of anguish and despair, I have tried to locate the dark corners of American life which might have predicted that the leaders of the United States could trash the norms of civilized conduct that have been so arduously put into place over the past centuries and condone—worse, encourage torture. An obvious place to look was the viciousness of the American prison system. The ugly bullying that is permitted on American playgrounds provided another bedrock example of tolerance for inflicting pain and humiliation.

Now we have a fresh example of the normalization of brutality, though I suppose I should have been ready for it, because the advocacy of kinky, pain-based sex has been “cool” for some time.

Here are the images featured on a handbag that Saks Fifth Avenue expects to be a big seller:

1. A naked person in chains dangling by the wrists, a well-known torture position that causes extreme pain and eventually death by strangulation. Captives in Afghanistan and/or Abu Graib died this way, thanks to torture by American soldiers enabled by procedures loudly promulgated by the sitting president of the United States who should be tried for war crimes.

Looks Like a Busy Day

by CKR

Before I head off to give a talk on the India-US nuclear deal, I want to list some worthwhile reading and give some preliminary observations on the latest terrorist scare.

It appears that the screeners are focusing on liquids. Explosives never were my primary expertise, but I've picked up a bit here and there. Unless I'm wildly out of date, that must mean nitroglycerin. I saw a wild comment about two liquids being mixed together to explode, which would be nitric acid and glycerin, but my recollection is that nitroglycerin has to be fairly pure to be explosive. And then it's very sensitive; a boy in my junior high school was rumored to keep a bottle of pure nitroglycerin under his bed. He wound up with a long absence from school and a glass eye.

So if the terrorists, say, dropped a carryon, they might well blow up long before they got on the plane.

There will be more information later, so consider those comments preliminary.

I'd hate to be flying across the Atlantic without carryon, though, particularly my bottle of water. I suppose the airlines will be glad to sell these deprived travelers some...

On the Lieberman defeat:
Who's Polarizing Now - Boston Globe

The Death of Triangulation - Eli Pariser

Voter Anger that Cuts Both Ways - David Broder

The Mideast Mess: Richard Holbrooke worries about the 1914 analogy.

Iraq
Marshall Plan, Minus the Plan - LA Times

Jim Baker's Task Force - Washington Monthly

Tuesday Dawn Wind Blogging

by CKR

…Out at sea the dawn wind
Wrinkles and slides. I am here
Or there, or elsewhere. In my beginning.
T. S. Eliot, East Coker

I love to wake up early and watch the sun rise. But there’s more to dawn than that. Eliot is referring to the dawn wind from the ocean. John Fowles, in The Magus, describes the dawn wind on his Greek island eloquently.

Rudyard Kipling wrote a poem fully devoted to it, with a subtext that may have to do with the Renaissance. That’s what the dawn wind does: cleans the slate for today.

We have a dawn wind here, too. It comes off the mountains to the east about an hour before dawn. Dawn brings other rearrangements, too. Night clouds dissipate or fog condenses as the earth warms. We’ve had lovely soft rain showers just before and sometimes into dawn. Saturday we had a particularly good one, maybe a half inch of rain, that lasted through the opening of the Farmers’ Market.

I’ve had dawn and dusk winds explained to me by meteorologists, but I can never quite remember the explanation, and I can’t google up anything good. I think it’s that the cool, dense higher mountain air moves down as the earth warms the air over the lower lands, but that doesn’t seem to work for just before sunrise, when the air around here is still cooling. Maybe it’s the sun warming the earth on the east (other) side of the mountains, getting that air moving?

My part of Santa Fe has had its own mini-drought. As El Paso was suffering floods, and Albuquerque drenching, the storms stayed away from my house. Rain to the north and south, east and west, avoiding a central swath of the town. I had to water last week, as absurd as that seemed under the clouds and tv reports. That ended on Saturday. Saturday evening the peeper frogs were out. I don’t know if our peepers are the same as Minnesota’s, but I’ll link there anyway.

The world is a messy place: this garden needs constant tending

By PHK

If it was ambiguous before, it should be no longer. Since March 2003, the Bush administration has demonstrated time and time again that it doesn’t give a fig about how the U.S. is perceived abroad. Regardless of what it says, W’s unswerving support for Israel right or wrong is just the latest example. This includes this weekend’s UN Security Council cease-fire resolution which is going nowhere fast despite Condi’s assertion that “these things take a while to wind down.”

The cavalier, short-sighted, biased attitude that permeates this administration’s foreign policy particularly with respect to the Middle East, is unlikely to change until the final packing crate has left 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW and the last neocon has been evicted from his or her desk at the NSC, in the Vice President’s Office, the Pentagon as well as the State Department.

Two and one-half years is a long time to wait, but sending in the posse to root out our bumbling leadership between then and now is unlikely to happen. The closest we’ll be able to get to it is with a sea-change in Congress come the November elections - if this, in fact, happens.

Meanwhile, the situation in the Middle East - along with America’s image abroad – is likely to deteriorate further because W and his crew haven’t had an original idea in years. This “great decider” has no comprehension that changing goals, strategy and tactics are imperative. Improvisation to adapt to changing circumstances and unforeseen events is not one of his or his advisors talents: remaking the Middle East to the benefit of Israel and the detriment of its neighbors remains the goal come hell or high water.

This will not make the world a safer place

Vultures Hovering over Cuba

By PLS

The Bushies are hovering like vultures over Castro’s hospital bed, their assumption being that, post-Fidel, there will be an instant clamor for US-led political change.

A plan announced by the State Department two weeks ago will provide $80 million over two years to finance the transition to a US-friendly government polity and an exploitable economy. There’s oil in the waters off Cuba, evidently, and I can imagine that Vice Cheney and his friends are dying to get their hands on it. The US would also send special monitors and advisors to Cuba in the weeks after a “full transition” begins, assuming American mentors are wanted, which may not be the case, if Cubans are to have any say in the matter.

The US is also warning others to stay out of the political mix in a post-Fidel Cuba. This means Hugo Chavez, Fidel’s young buddy, who is using Venezuela’s soaring oil profits to buy military hardware from Russia and friends from elsewhere.

Bush speech writers love to use the imperious style. Iran must do this. Syria must do that. Or else. But warnings aren’t the best way to keep Chavez-style populism from looking good to post-Fidel Cubans. What’s needed is an intelligent policy, a sophisticated policy, a far sighted policy. Cuban’s need to believe that closer relations with the US will lead to tangible benefits—for all, not just a business class, not just an elite, and certainly not just for American investors.

So let’s look around the Caribbean before we assume that Cubans, once “free,” will clamor for US intervention. How are Cuba’s neighbors doing?