What was supposed to be a ten-day sprint towards Baghdad ended yesterday when the US Marines 11th regiment came to rest. The force had all but exhausted its supplies of fuel, food rations, ammunition and water, and morale was at an all-time low.
...
Some units were down to just one day's supply of food. Many of the vehicles' fuel gauges were close to the red.
All hail Dear Leader!
For a completely irreverent look at Bush and (hero) worship, take a look at the weblog: The Temple of George W. Bush
We recommend starting at the bottom of the page (hit "End" on your keyboard) and scrolling up. Contains hilarious PhotoShop-like work.
"I have committed to pray for you, your family, your staff and our troops during this time of uncertainty and tumult. May God's peace be your guide," says the pledge, according to a journalist embedded with coalition forces.
The pamphlet, produced by a group called In Touch Ministries, offers a daily prayer to be made for the US president ...
Sunday's is "Pray that the President and his advisers will seek God and his wisdom daily and not rely on their own understanding".
Yes, don't rely on "understanding", which is bothersome rational thinking.
Why not pray that the President "comes to his senses" and stops this crazy war?
The coalition is now hellbent on victory at any cost, but it is not a price worth paying
Mary Riddell Sunday March 30, 2003 The Observer
The dictionary of war has been translated in a week. Apocalypse then was a firestorm over Baghdad. Now it's the porridge of marshland skirting the Euphrates, a doomscape that struck a marooned correspondent as 'apocalyptically bleak'. The mood in Downing Street can hardly be more cheerful.
Victory is not going to be won by a pincer action of hi-tech Armageddon and Twix bars. The Iraqi people have not enjoyed being bombed, shot at and invaded half as much as they were supposed to. The war may still be over quickly, but it seems unlikely.
<snip>
Here, instead of sanitised technology, is a people's war, with the mud and blood and weariness of conflict down the ages.How much of it arewe permitted to see and how much can we bear? Are the images of an Iraqi boy with half his head shot away and the twisted bodies of civilian victims suitable for public viewing? Of course. Politicians dissemble and ignorance soothes. The dead and maimed of this conflict, and every other, sometimes offer a more honest testimony than the unharmed.
Children still sell the image of Kim Phuc outside the War Remnants Museum in Saigon. Old hatreds are eroded, as they should be, and memories blunted. They have replica GI dogtags at the official gift shop now. But the picture of a nine-year-old girl, naked, ablaze with napalm and fleeing down the Trang Bang road, still freezes history. The agony in one child's eyes tells of all that happened in Vietnam and why it must never be repeated.
<snip>
Saddam, meanwhile, is lionised, both by those citizens who hate the invaders more than they hate him and by others enraged by pictures of wounded and dead civilians. The child with the shattered skull is becoming the Kim Phuc of the Arab world. In theory, the Iraqi regime could fall at any moment, but for now it looks more solid than ever.
<snip>
The coalition has unearthed rumours but no chemical weapons. The third-string rationale, a moral crusade to free the desperate, has been exposed as deluded fantasy. In these admittedly early days, the only tangible results of this people's war lie in morgues and hospital beds. Mourn first the Iraqi children, innocents who deserve none of this. Consider Iraqi soldiers, or 'fanatics' as our politer newspapers call those whose crime is to defend their land. A headline reading '175 Iraqis dead' is longhand for 'Gotcha'.
Pity those parents who weep on Mother's Day for children whose coffins are already arriving home. Images of death are harrowing, but so are the portraits of those dispatched to die; carefree boys with pints of beer at their elbows, or solemn in uniform. The youngest Briton to be killed was just 19.
Every conflict produces its anthem for doomed youth, but this is an elective crusade, fought not in extremis but because of political desires. They call it a humanitarian war. There is no such thing. Death is equally brutal, whether it is delivered by a resident dictator or a US missile, and politicians, however moral, are rarely as merciful as they pretend.
The coalition is in a bind. If it pursues its stated mission of caring for civilians, it will win less quickly. If it acts more brutally, it will spark ahatred that will imperil any peace. Already, some newspapers counsel a tougher approach. If the ungrateful citizens of Iraq don't want liberation, they can have attrition instead. Others, insidiously, argue that more killing now will spare lives in the long run.
The official line remains that Iraqis will get our message of a better tomorrow. But how can they? Even we barely know what it is. When the plan is for an American military protectorate followed by an unspecified leader, possibly ex-Baathist, it is unsurprising that Baghdad's citizens are not strewing the streets with rose petals.
<snip>
There is rioting in Kashmir. North Korea has raised its military spending again. Russia has put off ratifying its arms treaty. The road map for Palestine sounds like another dead end. What is this war for?It is for winning. Bush will not countenance defeat, for if he loses, he will have visited upon his country a devastation of which al-Qaeda could only dream. The bottom line is victory at any price.
But the dead children, the mangled and burned civilians, are inadvertent conscripts to another battle. There remains the hope that the weakmay, in the end, still vanquish the strong. The hawks of Washington, who have so misread Iraq, may never dare pursue their threat to crush more regimes on unmandated whims. And British politicians may ponder, in whatever uneasy peace exists, the distinction between liberation and a bloodbath.
If you work at Fox News, this isn't Gulf War II -- it's Christmas.
Since this is what most people are watching these days anyway, let's catch up on how the television news networks are faring in week one of Gulf War II.
CNN: CNN has probably done the best job of exposing the more tragic aspects of this war -- namely the fact that its reporting crew got kicked out of Baghdad over the weekend. The resulting 72 hours of nonstop coverage of the crew's tearful group hugs at the Jordanian border and ceaseless "how did you feel?" line of questioning from Atlanta made me think I had stumbled on an episode of Oprah. The fact that this had suddenly become "the story" in CNN's eyes, even as U.S. and Iraqi soldiers were getting immolated across the border, illustrates the inward focus that has played a primary role in the network's downfall. If "sexy" Paula Zahn doesn't up the ante and start adopting a more aggressive interview style soon (think Sharon Stone in "Basic Instinct"), CNN is pretty much toast.
This Baghdad eviction has left the network in such a state that all it can do when the ratings-boosting pyrotechnics light up the Baghdad skyline is have sexy Wolf Blitzer narrate it from his suite at the Kuwait City Hilton, where the thundering in the background is just room service bringing up some fresh shrimp cocktail. Don't blame Fox News for your misfortunes, CNN -- blame AOL Time Warner. Things fall apart.
MSNBC: What could be freakier than Lester Holt's botox permagrin as he recites the growing body count from the commander in chief's latest wacky misadventure? Maybe it wasn't botox -- maybe he was born with his mouth frozen like that. Regardless, it's trademark of MSNBC's robotic news delivery, which drones on for long sing-songy stretches only to be eventually shattered by Chris Matthews's hyperactive barking as he gnashes and hurls himself like a crazed Lhasa Apso at the heels of some unsuspecting liberal peacenik lured into the studiowith the promise of some free government cheese.
One interesting feature of MSNBC's coverage is the huge map of Iraq laid down on the studio floor like a supermarket advertisement for Empire Flakes. All that's missing is the little toy tanks and planes being pushed around by generals on their hands and knees making zoom-zoom noises. MSNBC does claim frequent contact with an actual Baghdad correspondent, CNN refugee Peter Arnett, but Pete is suspiciously quick to note that he's actually a National Geographic correspondent, ostensibly left behind on a Mesopotamian excursion gone horribly awry.
FOX NEWS: Like an Iraqi soldier dressed in civilian clothes, Fox News has crept in under the false cover of objectivity to unleash a blitzkrieg of bias so right wing that channel-surfers often mistake it for a eugenics infomercial. The only nod at an actual exchange of ideas is Hannity bitch-slapping the hapless Colmes while slobbering permaguest Bill Bennett slowly undoes his belt buckle in anticipation of giving that liberal fucker his final comeuppance. It's enough the scare the teeth right out of Ann Coulter's vagina.
On Fox News, it's not "Attack on Iraq," it's not "Gulf War II," no, it's "Operation Iraqi Freedom, ANY QUESTIONS, BITCHES?" I'm surprised Dick Cheney doesn't call to tell them to tone it down a bit. Fox News also takes the prize for being "most indignant" that the Iraqis have decided they have nothing to lose by not fighting fair. All I know is that it must drive the audio technicians nuts to keep having to pod down all that goose-stepping in the background. If you work at Fox News, this isn't Gulf War II -- it's Christmas.
AL-JAZEERA: It's so obviously the Jews. While the Bush administration swims in hypocrisy with virtually every statement it makes, are there any Arabs who recognize that if they just had a news service that countered this with anything approaching objectivity, somebody might take them seriously? After all, this is a television station that still insists all the Jews got out of the World Trade Center before the planes hit despite the fact that this rumor was proven to be your basic email hoax. If email is Al-Jazeera's source du jour, why haven't they reported on the ease with which any man can lengthen his penis two inches? They would surely rule the world within days! Here's the truth: Until the Arab world gets a mouthpiece that generates information that doesn't read like headlines out of the Weekly World News Paranoid Edition, nobody will take their concerns seriously.
ABC, CBS, NBC: Who gets home in time to watch the news at 5pm every day? The elderly and the unemployed, that's who. The traditional network news operations are so irrelevant it's a wonder the U.S. military still bothers to send them press releases.
THAT SAID, a lot of the failings of the war coverage are shared ones. Whether you're a war supporter or a war protester, there's a lot of information that's been withheld from you like you're a five-year-old, because American news coverage has self-censored itself to the point of irrelevance. We see when the pyrotechnics light up Baghdad, but we haven't seen the POWs, the civilian casualties, or the details of Halliburton's brazen and immediate lunge at the profit piñata. We haven't explored the curious absence of any evidence of weapons of mass destruction despite the fact that coalition troops now control large swaths of the country. We haven't explored the increasingly disturbing evidence that George W. Bush has turned over the day to day decision making to a little voice in his head he calls "God." No one asks the hard questions, which is why Donald Rumsfeld can wave the Geneva Conventions in the air with one hand while the other pushes the button to send electricity into the genitals of some innocent Afghani taxi driver rotting away at Guantanamo Bay, and not worry about being challenged by assembled reporters shaking in front of him like raw meat in front of a hungry lion.
This failure of American news coverage has its roots in the 1980s, when the corporatization of America's news media really got underway and professional worriers worried that if the process was allowed to continue, one day we wouldn't have a credible fourth estate when we really needed one. Like now.
The states of Massachusetts and Texas are preparing to consider bills that apparently are intended to extend the national Digital Millennium Copyright Act. (TX bill; MA bill) The bills are obviously related to each other somehow, since they are textually similar.
Here is one example of the far-reaching harmful effects of these bills. Both bills would flatly ban the possession, sale, or use of technologies that "conceal from a communication service provider ... the existence or place of origin or destination of any communication". Your ISP is a communication service provider, so anything that concealed the origin or destination of any communication from your ISP would be illegal -- with no exceptions.
If you send or receive your email via an encrypted connection, you're in violation, because the "To" and "From" lines of the emails are concealed from your ISP by encryption. (The encryption conceals the destinations of outgoing messages, and the sources of incoming messages.)
Worse yet, Network Address Translation (NAT), a technology widely used for enterprise security, operates by translating the "from" and "to" fields of Internet packets, thereby concealing the source or destination of each packet, and hence violating these bills. Most security "firewalls" use NAT, so if you use a firewall, you're in violation.
If you have a home DSL router, or if you use the "Internet Connection Sharing" feature of your favorite operating system product, you're in violation because these connection sharing technologies use NAT. Most operating system products (including every version of Windows introduced in the last five years, and virtually all versions of Linux) would also apparently be banned, because they support connection sharing via NAT.
And this is just one example of the problems with these bills. Yikes.
UPDATE (6:35 PM): It's worse than I thought. Similar bills are on the table in South Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Alaska, Tennessee, and Colorado.
UPDATE (March 28, 9:00 AM): Clarified the paragraph above about encrypted email, to eliminate an ambiguity.
A website keeping a running tally of civilian deaths in the Iraq war is attracting a lot of traffic, and appears to be emerging as an authoritative source of information on the gruesome subject.
The Iraq Body Count website claims to attract 100,000 visitors a day, and is increasingly being cited as a source in news outlets such as The Boston Globe, the San Jose Mercury News and the Associated Press.
"We're the responsible recorders of what the bombs are doing," said John Sloboda, one of the site's co-founders. "We're making sure (civilian deaths) are not forgotten, each single one."
The site's producers have also developed a JavaScript Web counter that can be added to any Web page to show the latest fatality estimates. The counters have been adopted by about 200 other websites, the project's site claims.
While no issue is as contentious in the Iraq war as civilian fatalities, no organization -- with the exception of Iraq Body Count -- appears to be keeping score. No one in the media, the U.S. military, the Iraqi government or humanitarian organizations like the Red Cross is estimating the conflict's running cost in Iraqi civilian lives.
Launched in January, the site is run by 16 researchers, largely academics and musicians based in the United States and the United Kingdom.
Sloboda, a 52-year-old psychology professor at the University of Keele in England, and Hamit Dardagan, a freelance researcher who lives in London, started the site.
The pair were inspired by the work of Marc Herold, a professor at the University of New Hampshire who devised the counting methodology when the U.S. military invaded Afghanistan last year. Herold felt Afghan civilian deaths were a critical issue that was largely being ignored. Herold is acting as a consultant to the Iraq Body Count project.
While Sloboda freely admits the project is "intensely political," and that most of the researchers are anti-war activists, he argued that the numbers are apolitical and speak for themselves. The raw data can and has been cited by people in both pro- and anti-war camps.
On one hand, the numbers illustrate the dreadful cost of war. On the other, they show how well smart weapons and careful planning can minimize casualties, especially when compared with the carpet-bombing campaigns of World War II or Vietnam.
"There's no inherent political message in the data," Sloboda said. "You read what you want into it, depending on your political perspective."
The site tallies civilian fatalities by analyzing news reports from dozens of mainstream news outlets, such as the BBC, The New York Times and Fox News.
If at least two reports of any incident -- a bombing, a missile strike or firefight -- record civilian deaths, they are added to the site's database.
There are often conflicting casualty estimates between reports, so the site records both the highest and the lowest numbers reported. As a result, the site's tally is expressed as the minimum and maximum number of fatalities to date. As of Thursday afternoon, the reckoning was at least 227 dead Iraqi civilians, and at most 307.
Sloboda said the site makes no claim to record the absolute numbers of civilians killed. "We are not counting deaths," he said, "but reports of deaths."
If available, the site also records personal details: who was killed, when, where and how.
Sloboda said most of the site's traffic comes from the United States. A link to the site in every story about the conflict posted on Yahoo News is driving a lot of U.S. visitors, he said.
The site has been the target of some heated criticism, most of it concerning the brutality of the Iraqi regime and its responsibility for the deaths of many of its own citizens. In response, Sloboda said, "We're responsible for our governments. We voted them into power. It's our taxes that are paying for the bombs. This is the project we've elected to do."
Sreenath Sreenivasan, director of online journalism at Columbia University, said the site is a novel use of the Internet -- both for gathering data and disseminating it.
Sreenivasan said it is in the interest of both sides of the conflict to control information about casualties -- the United States to play it down, and the Iraqis to play it up -- and if the project's numbers are accurate, then it is providing a unique and useful service.
"This is something we haven't seen in previous wars," he said. "It's another use of information that the Internet is bringing to the public."
The U.S. Department of Defense didn't return calls requesting comment, but in January 2002, during the war in Afghanistan, Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Dave Lapan told Wired News that U.S. forces only had the resources to track casualties among its own ranks.
"We only track U.S. casualties," he said. "We don't track, and don't have the means to track, casualties ... either civilian or noncivilian."
Lapan said U.S. forces "have gone to painstaking lengths to minimize civilian casualties.... Obviously, we regret any civilian loss of life, and in any case it's always unintended. We avoid attacking targets if there are civilians nearby."
Julian Borger in Washington Wednesday August 21, 2002 The Guardian
The biggest war game in US military history, staged this month at a cost of £165m with 13,000 troops, was rigged to ensure that the Americans beat their "Middle Eastern" adversaries, according to one of the main participants.
General Paul Van Riper, a retired marine lieutenant-general, told the Army Times that the sprawling three-week millennium challenge exercises, were "almost entirely scripted to ensure a [US] win".
He protested by quitting his role as commander of enemy forces, and warning that the Pentagon might wrongly conclude that its experimental tactics were working.
When Gen Van Riper agreed to command the forces of an unnamed Middle Eastern state - which bore a strong re semblance to Iraq, but could have been Iran - he thought he would be given a free rein to probe US weaknesses. But when the game began, he was told to deploy his forces to make life easier for US forces.
"We were directed... to move air defences so that the army and marine units could successfully land," he said. "We were simply directed to turn [air defence systems] off or move them... So it was scripted to be whatever the control group wanted it to be."
The Army Times reported that, as commander of a low-tech, third-world army, Gen Van Riper appeared to have repeatedly outwitted US forces.
He sent orders with motorcycle couriers to evade sophisticated electronic eavesdropping equipment. When the US fleet sailed into the Gulf, he instructed his small boats and planes to move around in apparently aimless circles before launching a surprise attack which sank a substantial part of the US navy. The war game had to be stopped and the American ships "refloated" so that the US forces stood a chance.
"Instead of a free-play, two-sided game as the joint forces commander advertised it was going to be, it simply became a scripted exercise. They had a predetermined end, and they scripted the exercise to that end," Gen Van Riper said. He said he quit when he found out his orders were being over ruled by the military coordinators of the game.
Vice-Admiral Marty Mayer, one of the coordinators, denied claims of fixing. "I want to disabuse anybody of any notion that somehow the books were cooked," he said.
The games were designed to test experimental new tactics and doctrines advocated by the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, and were referred to in Pentagon-speak as "military transformation".
The transformation is aimed at making US forces more mobile and daring, but Gen Van Riper said that the "concepts" the game were supposed to test, with names such as "effects-based operations" and "rapid, decisive operations", were little more than "slogans", which had not been properly put to the test by the exercise.
[No wonder U.S. troops say that that their training did NOT prepare them for this war!]
When I buy a pint of Guinness there is no doubt the liquid is black.Yet the bubbles that settle on top, which are made of the same stuff, are white. The same is true of many types of beer. Why? Stewart Brown , Bristol, UK
Answer In the interests of science I poured myself a Guinness and waited until the rising bubbles had formed a creamy head. I put a little of this in a dish and examined it through a low-powered microscope. Unlike bath foam, which has many semi-coalesced bubbles, Guinness foam is made mainly of uniformly sized, spherical bubbles of about 0.1 to 0.2 millimetres in diameter, suspended in the good fluid itself.
Near the edge of the drop of foam it was possible to find isolated examples of bubbles, and by viewing objects held behind these it was clear that they were acting as tiny divergent lenses. Just as a clear spherical marble, which has a higher refractive index than the surrounding air, can act as a strong magnifying glass, so spherical bubbles in beer diverge light because the air they contain has a lower refractive index than the surrounding fluid.
As a result, light entering the surface of the foam is rapidly scattered in different directions by multiple encounters with the bubbles. Reflections from the bubbles' surfaces also contribute to this scattering. Some of the light finds its way back to the surface and because all wavelengths are affected in the same way we see the foam as white. Light scattering from foam is akin to the scattering from water droplets that causes clouds to be white. This is called Mie scattering.
I sat back and drained the glass. On closer inspection, the head of Guinness is actually creamy coloured, and a drop or two that remained in the bottom of the glass had a light brown colour. Although bulk Guinness appears black, it is not opaque. In the foam there is not so much liquid most of the space is taken up by air. But because light is scattered from bubble to bubble the intervening brew does absorb some of it, providing a touch of colour.
Needless to say, to ensure reproducibility the experiment was repeated several times.
WASHINGTON, DC—Frustrated with the United Nations' "consistent, blatant regard for the will of its 188 member nations," the U.S. announced Monday the formation of its own international governing body, the U.S.U.N.
Above: The U.S. and U.S. delegations.
"The U.N. has repeatedly demonstrated an inability to act decisively in carrying out actions the U.S. government deems necessary," U.S.U.N. Secretary General Colin Powell said. "Every time we tried to get something accomplished, it inevitably got bogged down in procedural policies, bureaucratic formalities, and Security Council votes."
"I predict the U.S.U.N. will be extremely influential in world politics in the coming decades," Powell continued. "In fact, you can count on it."
The new organization will be based in Houston, where a $400 million U.S.U.N. Building is currently under construction. The U.S.U.N. Charter, ratified unanimously by delegates in a four-minute vote Monday, sets forth the mission of the organization as "the proliferation of peace and international economic, social, and humanitarian progress through deference to the U.S."
"The U.S.U.N. resembles the original in almost every way, right down to all the flags outside our headquarters," said Condoleezza Rice, a U.S. delegate to the U.S.U.N. "This organization will carry out peacekeeping missions all over the world, but, unlike the U.N., these missions will not be compromised by the threat of opposition by lesser nations."
In its first act, the U.S.U.N. Security Council unanimously backed a resolution to liberate Iraq's people and natural resources from the rule of Saddam Hussein.
"We gave the old U.N. a go for I don't know how many years, but it just wasn't working," said Dick Cheney, a U.S. delegate to the U.S.U.N. "Really, I have no idea what we were doing sacrificing all that power and autonomy in exchange for a couple of lousy troops from New Zealand."
Added Cheney: "I can't tell you how much easier it is to achieve consensus when you don't have to worry about dissent."
Cheney, along with Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Tom Ridge, and George W. Bush, make up the five permanent members of the 15-person U.S.U.N. Security Council.
"The five Security Council members have veto power to block U.S.U.N. resolutions for military action," Rumsfeld said. "Not that anyone would, but it's nice to have, nonetheless."
According to Powell, in spite of the fact that delegates hail from every corner of the U.S., General Assembly meetings have been refreshingly free of rancor.
"We've got Bill Frist from Tennessee, Tom DeLay from Texas, and Dennis Hastert from way up in Illinois," U.S.U.N. delegate Rick Santorum said. "Despite the diverse backgrounds of the delegates, cooperation has not been a problem—unlike at some outmoded, gridlocked international peacekeeping bodies I could name."
The official U.S.U.N. language is English. The official religion is Christianity.
With their jazzy graphics, fact boxes and breathless statistics, the military pundits are everywhere. But aren't they enjoying themselves a little too much? And who wants to know all this stuff anyway? Could sex have something to do with it, wonders Emma Brockes?
Consider an exchange that took place last week on Sky News, between the studio anchor and defence expert of the hour, Colonel Mike Vickery. With the aid of the Skystrator, Sky's hi- tech version of the Etch a Sketch, footage of a tank trundling across the desert was freeze-framed and decorated with red arrows to highlight its selling points.
Vickery: Moving at 35mph, that is a hell of a pace for not just an armoured vehicle, but a whole bunch of armoured vehicles.
Anchor: Does that surprise you?
Vickery: It doesn't really surprise me, but it's very impressive.
Anchor: OK. What are we looking at now?
Vickery: Here you can see the tank in its UK guise and you can see they've got that 120mm gun on the front there, that's got a range of over two miles. On the top you can see a hunter-killer sight, that is to say that the commander can look at one target while the gunner is engaging another one. And then you've got, of course, the armour, if you can see that square chunky appearance on the sides and at the front of the vehicle.
Anchor: Have these tanks been adapted for the desert?
Vickery: Indeed yes. I hope we can see in the moment, a desertised Challenger 2.
The war has authored lots of odd media moments, none odder, perhaps, than that witnessed by anyone who crashed home at 3am on Sunday morning and turned on the telly to find Angela Rippon, live on the ITV News Channel, describing the skyline of Kuwait as "elegant". But one of the most consistently striking things about the coverage of the conflict - and every other conflict of the modern TV era - is the way it has been dominated by an endless flow of facts, stats and graphics about military hardware, from the sort of spoddy experts usually banished to minority satellite channels aimed at men you would rather not sit next to on the tube.
The press is just as bad. Before the war had started, newspapers were cranking out "Path to War" supplements, which, in their fiddly, fact-boxey layout looked like those special- interest magazines that come with a free ring binder.
While Vickery was on Sky, over on BBC News 24 defence analyst Paul Beaver was pouring over a slightly less jazzy version of the Skystrator and speculating, "If I was a military commander, I'd be putting B52s into this sort of area."
The rolling news channels consume such vast amounts of material that, for practical reasons, it makes sense for them to deploy every scrap of trainspottery detail in the fight against oblivion - that exquisite moment when the news anchor realises just how far from the shores of meaningful speech he's drifted and fear shines in his eyes. Still, the undisguised enthusiasm with which, for example, Sky's Francis Tusa describes a particular sort of jet as a "little beastie", is not, one suspects, about practicality. Even without the Sun's explicit conflation of war and sex images (see Kelly Brook in a camouflage bikini and a series of topless women behind barbed wire entitled "weapons of mass seduction"), the connection isn't hard to make. War porn is everywhere and lots of people, men and women both, have found themselves responding to it.
"As a scholar of porn, I look at this and say 'these are boys with phallic toys'," sighs Linda Williams, professor of film studies and rhetoric at UC Berkley. It's not a new observation, but what is new, is the extent to which it is amplified by technology. "CNN have this special thing they do whenever they introduce a new weapon. It reminds me of the way athletes are introduced in coverage of the Olympics: a little inset comes out with their bio and stats. This weapon they had just now was something called the AC130H-Spectre - some dreadful machine - it came flying out and turned this way and that so that you could see it from all angles." (A similar thing happens on ITN: "It's amazing to see the Abrams tank and we've put together a little fact file.") "This," says Williams, "is the kind of spectacular vision you get in porn - where the point is to see the sex act from every angle. It's narcissistic; boys getting together admiring their toys. It is about us proudly displaying our weapons and there is something sexual about that."
It is also about the thrill, for non-combatants, of affecting familiarity with militaria: slang such as "bite and hold" and "use them or lose them" delivers a visible jolt of pleasure to its users, but even without this, so much of the language of war is borrowed from sex, sport and entertainment that it constantly undermines attempts by those who use it, to seem serious. Ten minutes of channel hopping produced this sequence:
"Flank protection."
"The thrust is actually going on outside Basra."
"Tanks tanks..."
"The big push."
"Kick off outside the airfields..."
"Deadly game of cat and mouse."
"Pounding the earth."
"We were barrelling along the main road with these missiles flying overhead. It was an extraordinary show."
This showbiz element of war is, to a limited extent, encouraged by the military. Witness the rabble-rousing speeches given to troops by their US commanders: "it's hammer time" and "resistance is futile," which is what the Borg, a race of cybernetic beings, say before they assimilate you in Star Trek.
"War films, that whole boys-own approach and language, is what they call the John Wayne syndrome," says Professor Joanna Bourke, historian at Birkbeck University in London and author of An Intimate History of Killing. "It is men in combat getting over their fear state by using the language and mythology of Hollywood."
Soldiers might be encouraged to imagine that they are on the frontier, fulfilling a heroic duty, in the style of the old westerns. "We've heard that in this conflict, soldiers were shown Band of Brothers before going into battle, which is extraordinary." It is also, says Bourke, an attempt to overcome the fact that "one of the worst things about the modern battlefield is that it's the loneliest place on earth. The military puts enormous effort into trying to personalise the conflict and to use every scrap of adrenaline, even sexual adrenaline, to this end."
Inevitably, John Wayne syndrome rubs off on people outside of the military, particularly those covering it, and sharing some of its risk, in the media. Some of them says Bill Durodie, senior research fellow at the Centre for Defense Studies, go native. "They don't take a step back. The fact that they are wearing gas masks in some ways means they are participating in the propaganda that Saddam has chemical weapons. It's this obsession with feeling the feeling, this emotionology."
Strangely, however, the most porny of war porn behaviour - the barely suppressed subtext of "fwor, check out the grenades on that" - is non-partisan, since pure weapons enthusiasts don't care about the politics of conflict so much as the specifications of the gear they are using. OK, so it's a cliche, but, says Dr Krista Cowman, senior lecturer in history at Leeds Metropolitan University, "Boys are both innately and through programming turned into obsessive collecting from an early age. My son collects Digimon cards at the moment; my husband, though an early modernist, has an anal obsession over first-world-war aircraft. It's about categorising and sorting; it's about the way the sexes communicate. Girls talk about their hopes and dreams and fears; boys communicate through the swapping of lists and football cards."
Among the weapons geeks, there is also, possibly, the over- compensatory stance adopted by people deeply, psychologically involved in war, but physically removed from the action. "People with the highest level of psychological breakdown are often behind the front lines," says Joanna Bourke. "The medical and supply corps, who can see the horror, but can't fight back, who don't have the purpose of the frontline soldier. That's why people at home - women, often - can express more virulent hatred of the enemy than soldiers. Soldiers understand that, in reality, the enemy is just obeying orders."
For the most part, the representations of war don't put too much store in reality. "I've never had a great deal of sympathy for Baudrillard," says Linda Williams, "but there is something to be said for the hyper-reality of this situation: it is intensified reality, verging on the unreal."
All the lavishly reproduced fact files and whizzy graphics, the 3D cartoon missiles and gleaming formation of tanks, photographed from above, seem to be engaged in an enterprise as unreal as their equivalent in the sex industry - an attempt to pass something ugly off as something beautiful.
In other news of the war, Enron leaders still not charged. Today's Houston Chronicle points out the obvious, if forgotten, fact that the key financiers of the Bush regime are still at large with their Weapons of Mass Influence still intact:
The arrest of two relatively unknown Enron executives this month raises hopes that the investigation is moving forward but also raises questions of whether criminal charges will ever reach the top of the corporate ladder.
Of the 12 criminal charges filed in connection with Enron's demise, only seven have been against Enron insiders and only one of those against a big fish -- the 78-count indictment against former chief financial officer Andrew Fastow.
Sixteen months after the company revealed accounting problems that lead to its downfall, a year after a special grand jury was seated and indicted Enron's accounting firm, the question that's being asked in office chatter and at dinner tables throughout Houston is whether executives such as former Chairman Ken Lay, former CEO Jeff Skilling or others will be charged.
"This is like Chinese water torture," said a lawyer familiar with the investigation. "There are all these threats and muscle-flexing from the government, but then nothing much happens."
The miilitary invasion of the world's second-largest known oil reserves doesn't really cut it as "nothing happening."
Lay, Skilling, and their Enron fraud helped these madmen come to power. Now that Cheney has sealed off the minutes of his six secret Enron meetings, and now that American profiteering has moved on to Iraqi slaughter, the White House is furiously rewriting history in the ugly scrawl of Karl Rove's and Karen Hughes's partisan penmanship.
The IRAQWAR.RU analytical center was created recently by a group of journalists and military experts from Russia to provide accurate and up-to-date news and analysis of the war against Iraq. The following is the English translation of the IRAQWAR.RU report based on the Russian military intelligence reports.
March 28, 2003, 1448hrs MSK (GMT +3), Moscow - According to the latest intercepted radio communications, the command of the coalition group of forces near Karabela requested at least 12 more hours to get ready to storm the town. This delay is due to the much heavier losses sustained by the coalition troops during the sand storms then was originally believed. Just the US 3rd Mechanized Infantry Division sustained more than 200 disabled combat vehicles of various types. The 101st Airborne Division reported some 70 helicopters as being disabled. Additionally, the recently delivered reinforcements require rest and time to prepare for combat.
At the same time the US forces have resumed attacks near An-Nasiriya and An- Najaf since 0630hrs and are continuously increasing the intensity of these attacks. During the night and early morning of March 28 the Iraqi positions in these areas were subjected to eight aerial assaults by bombers and ground attack aircraft. However, so far [the coalition] was unable to penetrate the Iraqi defenses.
Also during the early morning the British units begun advancing along the Fao peninsula. Latest radio intercepts from this area show that under a continuous artillery and aerial bombardment the Iraqis have begun to gradually withdraw their forces toward Basra.
First firefights between troops of the US 82nd Airborne Division and the Iraqi forces occurred in northern Iraq in the area of Mosula. At the same time the arrival of up to 1,500 Kurdish troops has been observed in this area. So far it is not clear to which of the many Kurdish political movements these troops belong. Leaders of the largest Kurdish workers party categorically denied participation of their troops. They believe that these may be units of one of the local tribes not controlled by the central authorities of the Kurdish autonomy and "ready to fight with anyone" for money.
According to verified information, during the past 48 hours of the Iraqi counterattacks the coalition forces sustained the following losses: up to 30 killed, over 110 wounded and 20 missing in action; up to 30 combat vehicles lost or disabled, including at least 8 tanks and 2 self-propelled artillery systems, 2 helicopters and 2 unmanned aerial vehicles were lost in combat. Iraqi losses are around 300 killed, up to 800 wounded, 200 captured and up to 100 combat vehicles 25 of which were tanks. Most of the [ Iraqi ] losses were sustained due to the artillery fire and aerial bombardment that resumed by the evening of March 27.
First conclusions can be drawn from the war
The first week of the war surprised a number of military analysts and experts. The war in Iraq uncovered a range of problems previously left without a serious discussion and disproved several resilient myths.
The first myth is about the precision-guided weapons as the determining factor in modern warfare, weapons that allow to achieve strategic superiority without direct contact with the enemy. On the one hand we have the fact that during the past 13 years the wars were won by the United States with minimum losses and, in essence, primarily through the use of aviation. At the same time, however, the US military command was stubborn in ignoring that the decisive factor in all these wars was not the military defeat of the resisting armies but political isolation coupled with strong diplomatic pressure on the enemy's political leadership. It was the creation of international coalitions against Iraq in 1991, against Yugoslavia in 1999 and against Afghanistan in 2001 that ensured the military success.
The American command preferred not to notice the obvious military failures during expeditions to Granada, Libya and Somalia, discounting them as "local operations" not deserving much attention.
Today we can see that in itself massed use of strategic and tactical precision- guided weapons did not provide the US with a strategic advantage. Despite the mass use of the most sophisticated weapons the Americans have so far failed to disrupt Iraqi command and control infrastructure, communication networks, top Iraqi military and political leadership, Iraqi air defenses. At the same time the US precision-guided weapons arsenal has been reduced by about 25%.
The only significant advantage of the precision-guided weapons is the capability to avoid massive casualties among the civilians in densely populated areas.
What we have is an obvious discrepancy between the ability to locate and attack a target with precision-guided weapons and the power of this weapon, which is not sufficient to reliably destroy a protected target.
On the other hand, precision-guided munitions demonstrated their superiority over conventional munitions on the battlefield. The ability to attack targets at long ranges with the first shot is the deciding factor in the American superiority in land battles.
The second myth disproved by this war is the myth propagated by the proponents of the "hi-tech" war, who believe in the superiority of the most modern weapons and inability of older-generation weapons to counteract the latest systems. Today the technological gap between the Iraqi weapons and those of the coalition has reached 25-30 years, which corresponds to two "generations" in weapons design. The primary Iraqi weapons correspond to the level of the early 1970s. Since that time the Americans, on the other hand, have launched at least two major rearmament efforts: the "75-83 program" and the "90-97 program". Moreover, currently the US is in the middle of another major modernization and rearmament program that will continue for the next five years. Despite of this obvious gap, Iraqi resistance has already been publicly qualified by the US as "fierce and resilient". Analysts believe that the correlation of losses is entirely acceptable to the Iraqis and they [ the analysts ] do not see any strategic coalition advantage in this war. Once again this proves that success in modern warfare is achieved not so much through technological superiority but primarily through training, competent command and resilience of the troops. Under such conditions even relatively old weapons can inflict heavy losses on a technologically-superior enemy.
Two enormous mistakes made by the US command during the planning stages of this war resulted in the obvious strategic failure. The US has underestimated the enemy. Despite the unique ability to conduct reconnaissance against the Iraqi military infrastructure through a wide network of agents implanted with the international teams of weapons inspectors, despite of unlimited air dominance the US military command has failed to adequately evaluate combat readiness of the Iraqi army and its technical capabilities; the US has failed to correctly asses the social and political situation in Iraq and in the world in general. These failures led to entirely inadequate military and political decisions:
The coalition force was clearly insufficient for a such a large-scale operation. The number of deployed troops was at least 40% short of the required levels. This is the reason why today, after nine days of war, the US is forced to resort to emergency redeployment of more than 100,000 troops from the US territory and from Europe. This, in essence, is the same number of troops already fighting in Iraq.
The buildup and distribution of the coalition forces have been conducted with gross neglect of all basic rules of combat. All troops were massed in one small area, which led to five days of non-stop fighting to widen this area. The initial attack begun without any significant aerial or artillery preparation and almost immediately this resulted in reduced rate of advance and heated positional battles.
Today we can see that the US advance is characterized by disorganized and "impulsive" actions. The troops are simply trying to find weak spots in the Iraqi defenses and break through them until they hit the next ambush or the next line of defense.
Not a single goal set before the coalition forces was met on time.
During the nine days of the war the coalition has failed:
- to divide Iraq in half along the An-Nasiriya - Al-Ammara line, - to surround and to destroy the Iraqi group of forces at Basra, - to create an attack group between the Tigris and the Euphrates with a front toward Baghdad, - to disrupt Iraq's military and political control, to disorganize Iraq's forces and to destroy the main Iraqi attack forces.
A whole range of problems that require their own solutions was uncovered directly on the battlefield. Thus, combat in Iraq raised serious concerns about the problem of coordination between units from different services. Limited decision- making time and the ability to detect and to engage an enemy at a great distance make "friendly fire" one of the most serious problems of modern warfare. For now the coalition has no adequate solution to this problem. At one location or another every day of this war the coalition troops were attacking friendly forces.
The second problem of the coalition is its inability to hold on to the captured territory. For the first time since the war in Vietnam the Americans have to deal with a partisan movement and with attacks against their [the US] lines of communication. Currently the coalition is rushing to form some sort of territorial defense units for guarding its supply lines and for maintaining order in the occupied territories.
A range of technical problems with equipment has been revealed during the combat operations. Most operators of the M1A2 Abrams main battle tank agree that the tank was inadequate for performing the set combat tasks. The primary problem is the extremely low reliability of the tank's engine and its transmission in desert conditions. Heat from the sun, hot sand and the constantly present hot dust in the air nearly nullified the advantages offered by the turret-mounted thermal sights. Visibility range of these sights did not exceed 300 meters during movement in convoy and reached up to 700-800 meters during stops. Only during cold nights did the visibility range reach 1000-1,500 meters. Additionally, a large number of thermal sights and other electronics simply broke down. The tiny crystalline sand particles caused electrical power surges and disabled electronic equipment.
This was the reason for the decision by the coalition command to stop movement of troops at night when a contact with the enemy was deemed likely.
The main strong side of the coalition forces was the wide availability of modern reconnaissance and communication systems that allowed to detect the enemy at long ranges and to quickly suppress the enemy with well-coordinated actions of different types of available forces.
In general the US soldiers showed sufficiently high combat resilience. Even in the extremely difficult weather conditions the troops maintained control structure and adequately interpreted the situation. Combat spirit remained high. The majority of troops remain confident in their abilities, while maintaining belief in the superiority of their weapons and maintaining reasonable confidence in the way the war is being fought.
It should be noted, however, that the way the war is being fought did create a certain sense of disappointment in most of the troops. Many are feeling that they've been lied to and are openly talking about the stupidity of the high command and its gross miscalculations. "Those star-covered Pentagon idiots promised us a victory march and flowers on the armor. What we got instead were those damned fanatics fighting for every dune and the sand squeaking in your ass!" said one of the wounded recuperating at a hospital in Rammstein. [ Reverse translation from Russian ]
Nevertheless, despite of the sand storms the terrain favors the coalition actions by allowing it to employ their entire arsenal of weapons at the greatest possible range, which makes it difficult for the Iraqis to conduct combat operations outside of populated areas.
Overestimating the abilities of its airborne forces was a weak side of the coalition. Plans for a wide-scale use of helicopters as an independent force did not materialize. All attempts by the US command to organize aerial and ground operations through exclusive use of airborne forces have failed. Because of these failures by the end of the fourth day of the war all airborne units were distributed across the coalition units and used by the attacking forces for reconnaissance, fire support, and for containing the enemy. The main burden of combat was carried by the "heavy" mechanized infantry and tank units.
Another serious drawback in the coalition planning was the exceptionally weak protection in the rear of the advancing forces. This resulted in constant interruptions in fuel supply. Tank units sometimes spent up to 6 hours standing still with empty fuel tanks, in essence, being targets for the Iraqis. Throughout the war delivery of food, ammunition and fuel remains a headache for the US commanders.
Among the US soldiers there has been a wide-scale discontent with the quality of the new combat rations. Servicemen are openly calling these rations "shitty." Many soldier just take the biscuits and the sweets and discard the rest of the ration. Commanders of the combat units are demanding from the coalition command to immediately provide the troops with hot food and to review the entire contents of the combat ration.
Among the strong sides of the Iraqi troops are their excellent knowledge of the terrain, high quality of defensive engineering work, their ability to conceal their main attack forces and their resilience and determination in defense. The Iraqis have shown good organization in their command and communication structures as well as decisive and and well-planned strategy.
Among the drawbacks of the Iraqi forces is the bureaucratic inflexibility of their command, when all decisions are being made only at the highest levels. Their top commanders also tend to stick to standard "template" maneuvers and there is insufficient coordination among the different types of forces.
At the same time commanders of the [Iraqi] special operations forces are making good use of the available troops and weapons to conduct operations behind the front lines of the enemy. They use concealment, show cunning and imagination.
The first strategic lessons of the war
[ Lessons of the war in Iraq are discussed here with a focus on a possible similar war between Russia and the US ]
The main of such lessons is the ever-increasing significance of troop concealment as one of the primary methods of combat. Concealment and strict adherence to the requirements for secrecy and security become strategic goals of the defending forces in the view of the US reliance and that of its allies on precision-guided weapons, electronic and optical reconnaissance as well as due to their use of tactical weapons at the maximum possible range afforded by these reconnaissance methods. Importance of concealment is being seen in Iraq and was clearly demonstrated in Yugoslavia, where the Yugoslav Army preserved nearly 98% of its assets despite the three months of bombing. Within our [Russian/European] battle theater concealment methods will offer us [the Russian army] an enormous advantage over the US.
The second lesson of this war is the strategic role of the air defenses in modern warfare as the most important service of the armed forces. Only the complete air dominance of the coalition allows it to continue its advance toward Baghdad and to achieve the critical advantage in any engagement. Even the short interruption in air support caused by the sand storms put the US and British troops in a very difficult situation.
Elimination of the air defenses as a separate service branch of the [Russian] Armed Forces and its gradual dissipation in the Air Force can be called nothing else but a "crime". [This statement refers to the recent unification of the Russian Air Force (VVS) and the Air Defense Force (PVO) and the secondary role of the air defense force within this new structure.]
The third lesson of the war is the growing importance of combat reconnaissance and increased availability of anti-tank weapons capable of engaging the enemy at maximum range. There is a requirement on the battlefield for a new weapon system for small units that would allow for detection of the enemy at maximum distance during day or night; for effective engagement of modern tanks at a range of 800-1000 meters; for engagement of enemy infantry at a range of 300-500 meters even with the modern personal protection equipment possessed by the infantry.
(source: iraqwar.ru, 03-28-03, translated by Venik)
While I appreciate the newfound skepticism amongst the press, let's make it clear that we are nowhere near that point. A quagmire signifies a years-long conflict in which military forces are bogged down with little movement toward victory. Four days of combat do not, in any way, indicate a quagmire.
What we are seeing is real war. An invading army is taking casualties from determined defenders. There's nothing shocking about this.
So let's stay off the "quagmire" label for now. We'll have plenty of opportunity to use it during the US's future long (and undoubtedly bloody) occupation of Iraq.
I wouldn't even say the US is taking heavy casualties -- they are relatively light compared to past conflicts. My problem is that I think one casualty is too many for this conflict. And given that "embedded" reporters have been suddenly shut down, I fear that casualties continue to mount.
Propaganda The US is really starting to lose the propaganda war, as everything it says turns out to be lies.
Witness:
Saddam is dead!Ok, no he's not.
Iraq fired a Scud at Kuwait!Ok, no it wasn't.
Umm Qasr is taken!Ok, no it's not.
The Iraqi 51st Division surrendered en masse!Ok, not it hasn't.
Republican Guard commanders will surrender!Ok, no they won't.
Basra is taken!Ok, no it's not.
We found a chemical weapons factory!Ok, maybe it isn't.
Sigh. The fact that these efforts to weaken Saddam's regime can be attributed to several reasons -- perhaps the regime wasn't as despised as claimed. Perhaps command and control is fully intact (they could've laid an underground fiberoptic lines impervious to US jamming or easy location and destruction).
Perhaps the Iraqi people don't give a damn. It's their country, and damn it, they'll defend it against anyone who dares invade it.
It's too bad, really. The early propaganda efforts ("RG generals will surrender") were actually quite good. But they didn't buy it. At this point the US propaganda machine is too discredited to be of much use.
T0seewhy "Chicago" became the movie of the year in a year when America sleepwalked into war, you do not have to believe it is the best picture of 2002 (mine would be Almodóvar's "Talk to Her"). Nor must you believe that musical comedy is making a comeback in Hollywood (it's barely holding its own on Broadway, where even "Hairspray" has empty seats). All you have to do is watch a single scene.
That scene is a press conference in 1920's Chicago. A star defense attorney, Billy Flynn (Richard Gere), wants to browbeat a mob of reporters into believing that his client, Roxie Hart (Renée Zellweger), did not murder her lover when in fact she did. "Now remember," Billy coaches Roxie, "we can only sell them one idea at a time." The idea: Roxie acted in self-defense. "We both reached for the gun," Roxie sings to the reporters, who obediently turn her lie into a rousing chorus, repeating it over and over in a production number that portrays them as marionettes, bowing and scraping to the tug of Billy's strings and spin.
For history's sake, this spectacle should be paired on the DVD with George W. Bush's fateful White House press conference of March 6, 2003. This was the president's first prime-time faceoff with reporters since a month after 9/11 and certain to be his last in what remained of peacetime. The former Andover cheerleader had failed to convince America's friends to come aboard. The economy was tanking. But the journalists at hand were so limply deferential to the president's boilerplate script that the subsequent, good-natured "Saturday Night Live" parody couldn't match the gallows humor of the actual event.
One reporter, April Ryan of American Urban Radio Networks, asked, "Mr. President, as the nation is at odds over war, how is your faith guiding you?" — a God-given cue for Mr. Bush to once more cloak his moral arrogance in the verbal vestments of humble religiosity. "My faith sustains me because I pray daily," came the president's reply. "I pray for peace, April, I pray for peace." Far be it from Ms. Ryan to ask a follow-up question about why virtually every religious denomination in the country, including Mr. Bush's own, opposes the war. She might as well have been Mary Sunshine (Christine Baranski), the sob sister reporter in "Chicago," who tosses Roxie an image-burnishing softball at her press conferenceby asking, "Do you have any advice for young girls seeking to avoid a life of jazz and drink?"
At Mr. Bush's sedated show there were no raised voices, not a single query about homeland security or Osama bin Laden. As Billy Flynn says, one idea at a time is enough for the journalistic pack — in this case the administration's idée fixe of Iraq. And like their "Chicago" counterparts, the Washington press corps were more than willing to buy fictions if instructed to do so by the puppeteer. "Eight times [Mr. Bush] interchanged the war on Iraq with the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001," wrote The New York Observer, "and eight times he was unchallenged." The unproven but constantly reiterated White House claim of a Qaeda-Saddam Hussein connection has now become a settled fact, not to be questioned at a press conference any more than any "Chicago" reporter challenges the mythical pregnancy Billy Flynn flogs in his propaganda campaign to save Roxie Hart.
The movie's press conference ends with Billy Flynn's message spreading from the servile reporters' lips directly to the next morning's paper: They Both Reached For The Gun is the banner headline we see rolling off the press. At Mr. Bush's press conference, under the guise of "news," CNN flashed the White House's chosen messages in repetitive rotation on the bottom of the screen while the event was still going on — "People of good will are hoping for peace" and " `My job is to protect America.' " No less obliging were the puppets at CNN's rival, Fox News, whose Greta Van Susteren sharply observed: "What I liked tonight was that in prime time he said to the American people, my job is to protect the American people." Though Mr. Bush usually appears on TV in front of White House backdrops stamped with the sound bite he wants to pummel into our brains, this time he didn't even have to bother. As he knew — and said, in his one moment of truth that night — the entire show was "scripted." It has been from the start.
That "Chicago" should catch the wave of an American moment in 2003 is remarkable when you consider that its roots go back to a Broadway play of 1926. Coolidge was in office when it had its premiere at the Music Box Theater under the direction of George Abbott — more than a year before the arrival of the most famous stage incarnation of Chicago city rooms, "The Front Page." "Chicago" was the first and only durable work by Maurine Watkins, a one-time Chicago Tribune reporter who had covered the Leopold-Loeb case and served as a movie critic. She was not enamored of her former profession. "They're awful dumb, reporters. Never get anything right," says the jail matron in a line that is paraphrased by Billy Flynn in Bill Condon's current screenplay.
When Watkins's play was reborn as a Bob Fosse musical on Broadway in 1975, it was seen as reflecting the cynicism of Watergate; the onstage band played a sardonic "Battle Hymn of the Republic" at the finale. When the musical was revived in 1996 — in the production still running on Broadway — Billy Flynn was identified with Johnnie Cochran and Roxie with O. J. Simpson. This year Miramax, the studio that produced the film "Chicago," is trumpeting the movie's social relevance in one of the relentless commercials of its Oscar campaign. The movie is "all about American institutions being corrupt," says its director, Rob Marshall, as we see black-and-white photographs of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein and of the disgraced Richard Nixon's departure from the White House.
That doesn't sound much like fun. But as concocted by Mr. Marshall, "Chicago" is nasty, clever fun. The director is a bit of a Billy Flynn in his own right. He has edited the movie within an inch of its life — or, more accurately, within an inch of Ms. Zellweger, Mr. Gere and Catherine Zeta-Jones's feet. You're never quite sure if the stars can really dance or if the dazzling montage is merely spinning the brilliant illusion that they can. But if the film is a "flimflam flummox," to quote its anthem, "Razzle Dazzle," that stylistic shell game could not be in more apt unison with the cynical content.
No one expected "Chicago" to become this big a hit (including me, though I've known two of its executive producers since they optioned a book of mine pre-"Chicago"). The movie's domestic box office is now double that of "Moulin Rouge," the only other movie musical to fly in years, and, unlike that predecessor, "Chicago" didn't have to throw in David Bowie and Beck to entice the musical-phobic youthful demographic thought to spurn show tunes by John Kander and Fred Ebb. Young audiences have turned up anyway. Everyone has. The film has touched a nerve this year as no previous incarnation of Watkins's play (there were two previous film versions) ever did.
In a case of life imitating art imitating life, "Chicago" is even mirrored in the year's juiciest Oscar scandal. Miramax, no wiser for fielding a TV ad trumpeting the Watergate bona fides of "Chicago," was caught in its own Watergate last week by John Horn of The Los Angeles Times. He reported that a publicist for the studio was the real author of a widely promoted OpEd piece carrying the byline of the director Robert Wise, now 88, endorsing Martin Scorsese as best director for another Miramax nominee, "The Gangs of New York." In angry response, some Academy voters demanded their ballots back so they could cancel their Scorsese votes — a mission as doomed as the reballoting demanded by Palm Beach County's hapless Pat Buchanan voters. No matter: Mr. Scorsese has lost anyway, even if he wins. His would-be benefactor, Miramax's Harvey Weinstein, has made him look craven.
Such Oscar battles are welcome comic relief when set against the backdrop of a real-life war. Which is not to say that this year's Oscar nominees don't take war seriously. In Roman Polanski's World War II drama, "The Pianist," a Nazi is moved to save a Jew's life after the Jew, starving and half-dead, plays an exquisite Chopin nocturne at the piano. This sentimental notion of art's transcendence über alles was echoed early last week in the vow by the Oscars' producer, Gil Cates, that the show (if not the red carpet) would go on tonight no matter what. After all, the Academy considered and rejected the notion of canceling in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor. Should Mr. Cates have reversed himself by now, he will have committed the cardinal Oscar sin of good taste.
It's hard to picture George W. Bush fretting about the fate of the Academy Awards, let alone seeing "Chicago," but he knows his westerns. Last weekend Vice President Cheney spoke admiringly to Tim Russert of how the president "cuts to the chase." In the Azores last Sunday, Mr. Bush instructed his erstwhile allies to "show your cards when you're playing poker." On Monday night, he gave the Hussein gang 48 hours to get out of Dodge. In the days to come, we just may finally learn who is brought back dead or alive.
POSTED: 4:14 p.m. EST March 21, 2003 UPDATED: 11:48 p.m. EST March 21, 2003
BALTIMORE -- One of the first American casualties in the war against Iraq is a Baltimore man, and his family shared their feelings about the war Friday. WBAL-TV 11 NEWS first broke the news Friday afternoon that a Baltimore man is among a group of Marines killed in a helicopter crash inside Kuwait that happened late Thursday night. He is identified as Marine Staff Sgt. Kendall Waters-Bey, 29, (pictured, right), of northeast Baltimore, WBAL-TV 11 NEWS reported. He is based out of Camp Pendleton in California and leaves behind four younger sisters and a 10-year-old son who lives in Baltimore.
"It's sad that this war is going on and that we have to lose so many people over nothing. I can't bring my brother back, but I really miss him," one of the soldier's sisters said. WBAL-TV 11 NEWS reporter Noel Tucker spoke with the Marine's father who lives in northeast Baltimore where friends and neighbors were seen sobbing in the streets, sharing their grief with the family. The family spoke with WBAL-TV 11 NEWS Friday afternoon and shared their feelings against the war. As he held a picture of his son, Waters-Bey's father, Michael, (pictured, left), said: "I want President Bush to get a good look at this, really good look here. This is the only son I had, only son." He then walked away in tears, with his family behind him. Kenneth, the Marine's only son, was with the family, (pictured, below right). A military spokesperson visited the family Friday morning to confirm that Waters-Bey had died in the crash. But the family had a feeling since Thursday night that he had died in the helicopter, Tucker reported. Waters-Bey's wife saw television footage of the helicopter crash and recognized the identification numbers. The family came to the conclusion that their son, brother and husband was on helicopter. And, before he left, Waters-Bey told his mother that he didn't think he would be coming home after his deployment, Tucker reported. Waters-Bey moved to California with his wife but has been in constant contact with his son and the boy's mother, Tucker reported. Waters-Bey, who played football at Northern High School in Baltimore, was last seen by his son, (pictured, right), a couple of months ago. According to the family, Waters-Bey didn't talk much about the war, but he said it was just something he had to do.
"My brother was the type of person that was loving, caring, and outgoing ... [he was a] joking type of guy, having you laugh ... It's a loss for us," Shernell Waters-Bey, the soldier's sister, said. Baltimore City police officers visited the family to convey the condolences of Mayor Martin O'Malley to the family. The mayor ordered all city flags to be flown at half-staff late Friday evening, Tucker reported. And Gov. Bob Ehrlich issued a statement in response, saying that Waters-Bey's death was "a heroic effort to make the world a safer place." At around 6 p.m., the Marines spoke about the deaths of those who perished in the helicopter crash. "To all those who have lost someone in this conflict, our hearts are with you. We are grateful to your sacrifice and the sacrifice your loved ones have made," Camp Pendleton Maj. Curtis Hill said. The three other Marines who died in the CH-46E helicopter crash were identified as Maj. Jay Thomas Aubin, 36, of Waterville, Maine, Capt. Ryan Anthony Beaupre, 30, of Bloomington, Ill., and Cpl. Brian Matthew Kennedy, 25, of Houston, Texas.
Trim and hyperkinetic at 40, Bonnie Bassler is often mistaken for a graduate student at conferences. Five mornings a week at dawn, she walks a mile to the local YMCA to lead a popular aerobics class. When a representative from the MacArthur Foundation phoned last fall, the caller played coy at first, asking Bassler if she knew anyone who might be worthy of one of the foundation's fellowships, popularly known as genius grants. "I'm sorry," Bassler apologized, "I don't hang out with that caliber of people."
The point of the call, of course, was that Bassler - an associate professor of molecular biology at Princeton - is now officially a genius herself. More than a decade ago, she began studying a phenomenon that even fellow biologists considered to be of questionable significance: bacterial communication. Now she finds herself at the forefront of a major shift in mainstream science.
The notion that microbes have anything to say to each other is surprisingly new. For more than a century, bacterial cells were regarded as single-minded opportunists, little more than efficient machines for self-replication. Flourishing in plant and animal tissue, in volcanic vents and polar ice, thriving on gasoline additives and radiation, they were supremely adaptive, but their lives seemed, well, boring. The "sole ambition" of a bacterium, wrote geneticist François Jacob in 1973, is "to produce two bacteria."
New research suggests, however, that microbial life is much richer: highly social, intricately networked, and teeming with interactions. Bassler and other researchers have determined that bacteria communicate using molecules comparable to pheromones. By tapping into this cell-to-cell network, microbes are able to collectively track changes in their environment, conspire with their own species, build mutually beneficial alliances with other types of bacteria, gain advantages over competitors, and communicate with their hosts - the sort of collective strategizing typically ascribed to bees, ants, and people, not to bacteria.
Last year, Bassler and her colleagues unlocked the structure of a molecular language shared by many of nature's most fearsome particles of mass destruction, including those responsible for cholera, tuberculosis, pneumonia, septicemia, ulcers, Lyme disease, stomach cancer, and bubonic plague. Now even Big Pharma, faced with a soaring number of microbes resistant to existing drugs, is taking notice of her work.
What Bassler and other pioneers in her field have given us, however, is more than a set of potential drug targets. Their discoveries suggest that the ability to create intricate social networks for mutual benefit was not one of the crowning flourishes in the invention of life. It was the first.
The bobtail squid lives in the knee-deep coastal shallows in Hawaii, burying itself in the sand during the day and emerging to hunt after dark. On moonlit nights, the squid's shadow on the sand should make it visible to predators, but it possesses a "light organ" that shines with a blue glow, perfectly matching the amount of light shining down through the water.
The secret of the squid's ability to simulate moonlight is a densely packed community of luminescent bacteria called Vibrio fischeri. Minutes after birth, a squid begins circulating seawater through a hollow chamber in its body. The water contains millions of species of microbes, but cilia in the squid's light organ expel all but the V. fischeri cells. Fed with oxygen and amino acids, they multiply and begin to emit light. Sensors on the squid's upper surface detect the amount of illumination in the night sky, and the squid adjusts an irislike opening in its body until its shadow on the sand disappears. Each morning, the squid flushes out most of its cache of glowing vibrios, leaving enough cells to start the cycle anew.
In the early '60s, Woody Hastings, a microbiologist at the University of Illinois, noticed a curious thing about the V. fischeri grown in his lab. The bacterial population would double every 20 minutes, but the amount of the cells' light-producing enzyme, called luciferase, would stay the same for four or five hours, dispersed among more and more cells. Only when the bacterial population had vastly increased would the flask begin to glow brightly.
From the perspective of a single V. fischeri cell, delaying light production makes sense. The emission of photons is metabolically expensive, as biologists say, and the puny glow of a lone organism is apt to be overlooked in the vastness of the ocean. So how do the cells know when they have reached critical mass? One of Hastings' students, Ken Nealson, theorized that they were secreting a chemical that accumulates in their environment until the group reaches some threshold density. He christened this unknown molecule an "autoinducer." Nealson's hunch turned out to be correct, and the chemical process by which V. fischeri keep track of their own numbers - determining, like a group of senators, that enough members are present to take a vote - was eventually dubbed "quorum sensing."
More recently, scientists have begun to understand that the importance of cell-to-cell communication goes far beyond mere head counting. Many things that bacteria do, it turns out, are orchestrated by cascades of molecular signals. One such behavior is the formation of spores that make bacteria more resistant to antibiotics. Another is the unleashing of virulence. For disease-causing pathogens like Staphylococcus aureus, waiting for a quorum to assemble before getting down to business has distinct benefits. A few microbes dribbling out toxins in a 200-pound host will succeed only in calling down the furies of the immune system. En masse, they can do serious damage. The first "sleeper cells" were bacterial cells.
Hastings, who is now at Harvard, admits that he underestimated the significance of what he saw in his lab. He assumed that quorum sensing was limited to the marine microbes he was studying. "I accepted the view that these bacteria were in a very specific situation," he says, with a burr of regret. "It doesn't take much reflection to think this must occur elsewhere."
The conclusion that only highly evolved organisms have the ability to act collectively proved to be a stubborn prejudice, however. On several occasions, Nealson tried to publish a diagram in microbiology journals illustrating cell-to-cell signaling in V. fischeri, but peer reviewers rejected it. Bacteria just don't do this, the critics told him.
John Trani's graduation present: his own Hooters restaurant
BY MATT SMITH
In the annals of gift-giving, certain moments stand alone.
In the year 32 B.C., Mark Antony gave Cleopatra the Riviera. In A.D. 36, God gave mankind his only son. And in the spring of 2003, Shirley and Nick Trani were so proud of their male child that they gave him, on his graduation from college, the most wonderful, inspiring, thoughtful gift a Southern California frat boy could possibly desire. They gave John Trani, who turned 24 last month, his own Hooters restaurant in San Francisco.
"We have a lot of faith in our son," says Nick Trani, who runs a string of Carl's Jr. franchises in the Modesto area.
"We're real excited about it because we like the concept. It's a good family restaurant," adds Nick's wife, Shirley.
Hooters is a chain of roadhouse-style restaurants along the lines of Chili's or Chevys, but with the added value of waitresses in orange running shorts and décolletage-friendly T-shirts. The chain's logo features an owl, suggesting, speciously, that the name refers to something other than boobs. There are currently no Bay Area Hooters franchises; if all goes well, John Trani will open the region's first in the former Steelhead Brewery space on Fisherman's Wharf, as soon as the Tranis finish remodeling it.
Perhaps sensing our excitement, John Trani didn't return our week's worth of calls requesting comment.
But that didn't matter; it's his parents, Nick and Shirley, who are the real heroes of this tale. They put their son through college at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, where he became fraternity programming coordinator of the Greek Council. They encouraged John to come up with a dream business plan, with the promise that they'd help him realize it. When John suggested buying and running a Hooters, which my sources tell me is like a PG-rated, hetero-male cheerleader fantasy, plus burgers and beer, Nick and Shirley plunked down a reported quarter-million dollars to help Trani junior realize his San Francisco dream.
It takes a village to raise a child, and Nick and Shirley Trani have entrusted their little darling, and his new Hooters, to the good people of San Francisco. With SF Weekly's long-standing commitment to family values in mind, we convened a uniquely qualified panel of consulting experts, including performers and entrepreneurs in the S.F. live adult entertainment industry, to proffer advice aimed at making sure John's San Francisco fantasy is a happy one.
San Francisco's newest surname in entertainment entrepreneurship is pronounced "tray-nee," not "tranny." Nonetheless, the Tranis may have given their son a more exotic frat-boy fantasy than he bargained for. Juanita More, aka Michael Rodriguez, aka Everybody's Good Time Gal, aka www.juanitamore.com, was happy to lend the young Trani a helping hand.
"Oh gawd -- a twentysomething belly-slapper running Hooters? When you're 24, it's still a belly-slapper, isn't it?" asks More, apparently thinking I am young enough to recall when a certain appendage smacked my abdomen. "I think it's going to really generate a lot of business in the tranny community. I think we're going to find a lot of new clients, because 18-year-old girls are trouble, trannies aren't. They'll go there and see what they can't touch, then follow me out the back door and hop in my '72 Buick Riviera and follow me downtown. I definitely think this will be good for the tranny community in more ways than one.
"You know, San Francisco is the land where everybody comes. Everybody comes here for something, and if you want orange hot pants, you go to Hooters. I just hope they have my fucking size. How do we get a pair of 58-inch hot pants?"
Donna Sachet, known to perform her review of comic and torch songs at Harvey's, Marlena's, and the Powerhouse, says she'd be perfect at Hooters. For one thing, drag queens, like Hooters Girls, must titillate without offending female guests.
"Waitresses have to be friendly, and there's going to be extra energy there. You want to create a disguise, an element of illusion. At the same time, you're not competing with any of the real hooters that are there," Sachet notes. "You always have to remember, their hooters are real, mine are Styrofoam."
In their Hooters orange-and-white T-shirts, women like Juanita and Donna may seem like fun at the outset. But unless young Trani makes a decision early on to refrain from fraternizing with the help, he's heading for trouble. Filled with worry for little John, we called SF Weekly consulting expert Steve Berkey, owner of Divas Nightclub and Bar, San Francisco's premier transgender entertainment venue.
"When you're in a business like that, it appears like you've got easy pickings," Berkey helpfully explains. "If you try to take advantage of the situation, you're going to create major problems for yourself. Employee attitude is going to suffer, because everybody wants to be treated equally and fairly. If there are favorites, that's going to quickly translate into employee bitterness and bad employee morale."
And just because he's working with scantily clad, post-teen women, Trani shouldn't think the job is free from hard work, Berkey advises.
"I tell you what: Dealing with all these girls is a challenge," Berkey explains. "The one thing I know he is going to run into is I seriously doubt it's going to be all the fun he envisions interviewing all these girls and keeping his place staffed. He's going to find out real quick that these girls are people like anybody else. He's going to find that what he really wants is reliability, and not strictly looks."
Dale Miller is not a tranny, exactly. And he doesn't work for Hooters. But the University of Arkansas computer programmer has a hobby that uniquely qualifies him as an SF Weekly consulting expert.
Ever since prudish citizens managed to close down the Little Rock Hooters a couple of years ago, Miller has spent his free time flying to cities where there are Hooters restaurants, dressing up as a woman, going out for burgers, and having his picture taken with the waitresses. Miller urges Trani to take Juanita and Donna up on their suggestion to spice up his S.F. Hooters with a few drag queens.
"I've not spent a lot of time around drag queens, but I think it would be interesting," says Miller, who's chronicled his cross-dressing Hooters visits at www.skirtman.org/hooters.html. "Some of the ones I've seen are excellent. You have to realize: 'Oh, it really wasn't a girl.' I think it could be interesting but in a different way. I might not have as much fun because, well, I like watching women.
"But I can see in your area it might be a real draw."
According to SF Weekly consulting expert and freshman city Supervisor Bevan Dufty, San Francisco is a community that cares about the young, John Trani included. Since Dufty was made aware of the new Hooters, he's been alerting residents of his supervisorial district, which includes much of the Castro neighborhood. Already, Dufty says, many S.F. residents are planning to dress as Hooters Girls this Halloween in support of young John. "I've discussed the potential for a Hooters coming to S.F.; everybody's been saying they want to dress in a Hooters uniform. They may not be able to outfit their staff by the time they are raided for Halloween 2003," Dufty notes. "I may have more guys going there, given the fact that this guy is fresh from a fraternity.
What are you going to do when they raise the Crayola Alert to RED?
I'm serious. What are your plans? Have you a clue?
Well, thanks to Steve at Illruminations, who found this pearl over at Metafilter, here's the deal: you stay home and wait.
That's right,you stay inside your house, lock the door, turn on the news, and probably go searching for that duct tape and plastic sheeting you bought earlier this year. But the one thing you're not going to do is Go Outside. Not if you know what's good for you.
Want to know more? Check out Tom Baldwin's Red Alert? Stay Home, Await Word, an article that ran in last Sunday's Courier Post Online. Here's a snip from Baldwin's piece...
If the nation escalates to "red alert," which is the highest in the color-coded readiness against terror, you will be assumed by authorities to be the enemy if you so much as venture outside your home, the state's anti-terror czar says.
"This state is on top of it," said Sid Caspersen, New Jersey's director of the office of counter-terrorism.
Caspersen, a former FBI agent, was briefing reporters, alongside Gov. James E. McGreevey, on Thursday, when for the first time he disclosed the realities of how a red alert would shut the state down.
A red alert would also tear away virtually all personal freedoms to move about and associate.
Be certain to pick up the rest of Baldwin's piece by clicking here. Reality is enough to knock your socks off.
Martial law looks about set to make an appearance in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Petrified. Nice of them to bring us up to speed, eh?
<snip> 47We were wondering why Florida's mailmen seem so well-adjusted. In an apparent move to depress them further, about 300 Florida residents with a history of depression open their mailboxes to find free samples of Eli Lilly's (LLY) new product, Prozac Weekly, along with a letter that enthuses, "We are very excited to be able to offer you a more convenient way to take your antidepressant medication." A class-action suit filed in July accuses Eli Lilly, Walgreens (WAG), a local hospital, and five doctors of violating the patients' right to privacy.
48-51.Net: Now we get it.
- Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, at a Microsoft .Net briefing day in July "One question might be, and I'll be as direct as I can be about this, what is .Net? Unlike Windows, where you could say it's a product, it sits in one place, it's got a nice little box. In some senses, it's a very good question."
- Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, on the same topic at the same briefing "We don't have the user-centricity. Until we understand context, which is way beyond presence -- presence is the most trivial notion of context."
- Charles Fitzgerald, general manager of Microsoft's platform strategy group, in August on ZDNet News "Our biggest problem was policing the use of .Net. Things like .Net Enterprise Servers. That's a great example of where the confusion came from, because it looked like we were slapping .Net on a bunch of random products."
- Steve Ballmer, trying again, in an October interview with News.com "It's about connecting people to people, people to information, businesses to businesses, businesses to information, and so on. That is the benefit."
52No? OK, how about this: I break into your house, steal your wife's jewelry, fence it to a guy named Speed, and then give you 30 percent. Whattayathink? Alex Tan, owner of Film88.com -- a website that streams first- release movies online for $1 a film -- is sued by nine Hollywood studios for stealing copyrighted materials. Tan claims to have offered to pay the studios 30 percent of his revenue as compensation. <snip>
With the no sign of an economic turnaround and the job market in shambles, job seekers have gotten so desperate that they've turned to a new breed of scamsters calling themselves "career marketers." While the term may not sound familiar, chances are you've run across them without knowing it.
Like so many mushrooms around a dead tree, career marketers lure unsuspecting job seekers into their offices with job listings then turn around and promise guaranteed '$50K to $500K' and '$75K to $750K' executive and professional positions for an up front one-time non-refundable fee of $5K to $30K depending on the options you choose and how much you make.
Many frantic job seekers take them up on this promise envisioning that their days of job searching will be over once they pay this fee. If they can start on a new job within 45 to 90 days as promised, the cost of the fee can be easily recovered in a month's salary.
Unfortunately there is no pot of gold at the end of this rainbow. Once the career marketers have your money, their interest in you diminishes as fast as the bubbles in a glass of Alka Seltzer. You are channeled into the regular routine of updating your resume, squeezing a mailing list out of a Dun & Bradstreet database based on your area of expertise, doing a mass mailing, and waiting for six months for something to happen before realizing that you have been had.
Who are the culprits? How do they work exactly? What can be done about them?
This column is an adjunct to the web site www.execcareer.com [site] which I started one year ago to cover one such company that scammed me. The web site now features 45 such companies nationwide, brought to my attention by job seekers who were scammed by them.
The web site is designed to warn job seekers about these companies and shows up on Google and other search engines whenever a job seeker types in the name of one of these companies. No such warning existed when I was scammed. It also contains secure discussion boards which were started earlier this year so victimized job seekers could plan how to get their money back and how to publicize the misdeeds of these companies. There are also links to many recently published articles about career marketing in national magazines and newspapers.
This column which will be published every Tuesday will feature the latest news on career marketing scams as well as the best ways to search for a job in these difficult times.
Reader input is appreciated and will be incorporated into future columns. You can contact me directly if you like at alansmithns@yahoo.com.
Nashville is NOT Hollywood. Do we need any more proof of that than two concurrent stories out of the Music City: the Charlie Daniels pro-war rant, producer for country TV channel replies, gets fired story; and the Dixie Chick Natalie Maines busts loose with an anti-Bush statement at a concert in London, feels the wrath of suburban Republicans from coast to coast story.
Unless you read Blogcritics or live in Nashville, you probably haven't seen too much about the Daniels story because the woman who got fired for her anti-war email wasn't a celebrity, just a civilian responding to a celebrity who had spoken the ostensible Nashville pro-war party line.
Natalie Maines is another story: the Dixie Chicks are pop-country icons already and multi-platinum superstars. She spoke Thursday night in London, she apologized Friday:
"As a concerned American citizen, I apologize to President Bush because my remark was disrespectful. I feel that whoever holds that office should be treated with the utmost respect. We are currently in Europe and witnessing a huge anti-American sentiment as a result of the perceived rush to war. While war may remain a viable option, as a mother, I just want to see every possible alternative exhausted before children and American soldiers' lives are lost. I love my country. I am a proud American."
Angry phone calls flooded a Nashville radio station on Thursday, some calling for a boycott of the trio's music. Two Dallas stations stopped playing the group's music because of Maines' comments. [AP]
Country stations across the United States have pulled the Chicks from playlists following reports that lead singer Natalie Maines said in a concert in London earlier this week that she was "ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas."
Station managers said their decisions were prompted by calls from irate listeners who thought criticism of the president was unpatriotic.
....One station in Kansas City, Missouri held a Dixie "chicken toss" party Friday morning, where Chick critics were encouraged to dump the group's tapes, CDs and concert tickets into trash cans.
Houston country station KILT pulled the band's records from its playlist -- at least temporarily -- after 77 percent of people polled on its Web site said they supported the move.
"We've got them off the air for right now," said Jeff Garrison, program director at KILT, which is owned by Viacom's Infinity Broadcasting Corp.
"People are shocked. They cannot believe Texas' own have attacked the state and the president," Garrison said.
....One of the country stations in Dallas that helped champion the Chicks when they were scraping by in that city playing gigs on street corners for tips, "99.5 The Wolf," said they are listening to the listener's views but do not think it is right to immediately jump on the bandwagon and stop playing the Chicks, said program director Paul Williams.
Williams said it is too early to tell how strong a backlash may develop against the Chicks. He said the comments touched a deep nerve in Texas because they came from one of the biggest country groups to come out of the state and were directed at a president who calls Texas home.
"The listener outlash is probably bigger here than anywhere else," William said. [Reuters]
Where did all of this outraged response come from? Well, um, outraged citizens of course, but doesn't the response strike you as a bit extreme? Check out this email that the sponsors of the Chicks' tour, Lipton, received from a "concerned citizen":
www.freerepublic.com claims over 30,000 members. The opinions on this forum are often racist, violent, and homophobic. I hope you will not feel pressured by them to change your policies. Keep in mind that they are very active and will give the appearance of a widespread reaction when in fact it's limited to their isolated group. These are not people you want to cater to, as you will see if you spend a little time observing them. And don't feel bad. Besides you, they are boycotting Canada, France, Germany, Russia, Mexico, Belgium, and 3/4 of hollywood. They are so petty that they research goods they believe are produced by these nations and list them for boycotting. The dumb thing is they get it wrong half the time.
I will be very dissappointed with Lipton if it tries to appease these radicals. I would continue to buy Lipton regardless though :)
When we went to the site it was clear what was going on, this organization had not targeted Lipton for their campaign, they had selected the Chicks for "FReeping."
As we reviewed the site we came across a whole area that was devoted to the Chicks, and more specifically the activities of the campaign against them, check it out:
As you move around this area and start to look at specific threads you will see that these people have actively manipulated radio polls, and how proud they are of their handiwork.
Here's some of their exchanges regarding their specific attempts to manipulate radio polls, notice the advice given on trying to ensure that their manipulations remain disguised:
To: webfooter Cat Country in Harrisburg has a poll on whether they should stop playing the Chicks. They attribute the quote to Natalie. Current vote is 5 for and 5 against. I would recommend only locals vote, but you FReepers can do what you want. Shalom.
To: webfooter; LindaSOG; Kathy in Alaska; radu; bentfeather; southerngrit; Bethbg79; All One of the country stations in my area is boycotting them: Here's the link! Please freepmail them thanks! I have done so already!! WCMS
38 posted on 03/13/2003 1:52 PM PST by MoJo2001 (God Bless Our Troops and Allies!!) [ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies ]
To: All LOL!! Um, email them! Don't freepmail them! My bad!
39 posted on 03/13/2003 1:52 PM PST by MoJo2001 (God Bless Our Troops and Allies!!) [ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 38 | View Replies ]
To: MoJo2001 FReep Natalie Maines' hometown country station! Natelie Maines' home radio station (KLLL.com) and email address of the DJ's. Just in case anybody wants to drop them a friendly email about boycotting the Chicks. As a bonus, pappa and the family live here too, so you are sure to get noticed.
....As always the "squeaky wheel gets the grease" and these weasels know how to squeak.
Consider a radio station that receives 1,000 calls and emails from listeners demanding that they boycott the Chicks music, they ignore the fact that 17,500 fans have bought tickets to a show in a couple of months and seem to think that these 1,000 calls/emails are somehow reflective of their audiences' wishes. Yet, the box office at the local venue receives only 3 calls regarding the show and wanting to know if they can arrange to return the tickets! Now the authenticity of the 1,000 is in question!
This email is unidentified and has its own ax to grind, but it does remind us that listener, customer, citizen complaints are often the result of organized campaigns and not the spontaneous behavior of independent individuals.
In the run up to a conflict in Iraq, foreign news websites are seeing large volumes of traffic from America, as U.S. citizens increasingly seek news coverage about the coming war.
"Given how timid most U.S. news organizations have been in challenging the White House position on Iraq, I'm not surprised if Americans are turning to foreign news services for a perspective on the conflict that goes beyond freedom fries," said Deborah Branscom, a Newsweek contributing editor, who keeps a weblog devoted to media issues.
In January, for example, half the visitors to the Guardian Unlimited news site, an umbrella site for Britain's left-leaning Guardian and Observer newspapers, were from the Americas.
According to Nielsen/NetRatings, 49 percent of the Guardian's 1.3 million unique visitors (that's the number of different visitors, not the site's total traffic) in January originated from the Americas.
"What we're seeing is a lot of searching for news information, particularly from America," said Richard Goosey, NetRating's international chief of measurement science.
Traffic from the Americas was not the result of an across-the-board increase in news consumption, Goosey said.
While news websites in general saw a 3 percent increase in traffic between December 2002 and January 2003, the Guardian saw a 10 percent increase in visitors, Goosey said. Meanwhile, CNN's website, one of the most popular news sites in the United States, saw a small decline in traffic.
Nonetheless, NetRatings reported that traffic from U.S. Internet users to all news sites was up markedly in February. U.K.-based news sites, including the Guardian, the Independent and the BBC, saw increased traffic from American users that month. So did MSNBC and CNN, two of the most popular U.S. sites.
Jon Dennis, Guardian Unlimited deputy news editor, said U.S. readers are visiting his site for the range of opinions it publishes, and to engage in vigorous debate. Media outlets in the United States, he said, are not presenting the issues critically.
"As a journalist, I find it quite strange that there's not more criticism of the Bush administration in the American media," he said. "It's as though the whole U.S. is in shock (from Sept. 11). It's hard for (the media) to be dispassionate about it. It seems as though they're not thinking as clearly as they should be."
Dennis charged that, unlike much of the American press, the Guardian site presents both pro- and anti-war positions. In addition, the Guardian encourages its readers to debate the issues, through the site's talk boards and interactive features like live interviews with various experts.
The only debate in the U.S. media is on the Web, Dennis said. "Weblogs are doing all the work that the U.S. media did in the past," he said. "That's an interesting development."
In fact, a lot of the Guardian's U.S. traffic is referred by weblogs, especially Matt Drudge's Drudge Report, said Nielsen's Goosey.
"The new war in Iraq has made world news sources far more important," said Stephen Gilliard, who posts a lot of foreign news stories to the weblog at NetSlaves. "While not all news sources are reliable, there is such a gap between the way Americans see the world and the way other people do that it is invaluable to use these resources."
There is also a growing tide of criticism of the U.S. media from members of the media, such as veteran CBS broadcaster Dan Rather.
Rather recently complained to the BBC about the media's lack of access to government officials, and the growth of "Milatainment" reality shows on U.S. TV, including ABC's Profiles from the Front Line and VH1's Military Diaries.
New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote, "(U.S. TV news) seems to be reporting about a different planet than the one covered by foreign media."
That's not to say U.S. news outlets are devoid of criticism for leaders' handling of the conflict in Iraq. Krugman himself is a case in point, having published a column last week with an opening sentence stating that "America's leadership has lost touch with reality."
Barb Palser, online media columnist for the American Journalism Review, believes that many visitors to foreign news sites are finding their way through links from U.S.-based publications. She cites the example of The Spokesman Review, a newspaper in Spokane, Washington, which provides links to outside news services, many of them overseas, as part of its Iraq coverage.
Another source that may be pointing U.S. news junkies overseas, Palser said, is Google. A search on Google News for the terms "Iraq" and "war" turned up more than 54,000 links, with articles from Australian, British and Saudi Arabian news outlets topping the list.
It has been brought to our attention that several unauthorized, sexually suggestive advertisements portraying the PUMA brand have been released over the Internet. We are appalled that images like these would be created and distributed under the PUMA name. As a brand, we seek to take a unique perspective toward our advertising in an effort to challenge the boundaries of our industry; however we would never consider using these tactics. We are in the process of researching the circumstances and reserve any legal steps available.
In February it was revealed that Jenna Jameson will soon become a public figure on behalf of Pony. Jenna Jameson is one of the stars of the Vivid adult entertainment juggernaut. In the next few days she will begin appearing on a line of condoms with the Vivid name. She also recently signed a new deal with Vivid in which will have more control over her career by producing in addition to her on screen performances. By making these moves into mainstream media Jenna seems on her way to becoming the primary figure behind mainstreaming porn. In April her reality television show Jenna Jameson's Stripper Ball will premiere on the Playboy Channel. By working with media properties such as Vanity Fair, Dennis Rodman, and Inside Edition her public profile and subsequent ability to sell products will be enhanced.
Notice the spunk on the girl's leg.
Given the increasing presence of the adult entertainment industry in mainstream culture it would not be surprising to see Puma advertising their wares in such a fashion. The parody of a fashion ad currently causing all the stress among Puma folks such as Peter Kim, who responded to Felix Salmon's query with the above quote expressing the appalled Puma "official" response to the overt sexual concourse presented in the fake ad.
The music industry this week condemned the launch of two recording systems that will let people copy between 30 and 100 hours of music onto a single disc. The launches, from electronics giants Sony and Philips, are being seen as a potential pirates' charter.
"It's a no-brainer. Anything which lets people pirate more music like this has to be very bad news for the music industry," says a spokesman for Britain's record industry trade association, the BPI.
The launches come as the global music industry suffers its worst downturn since the CD format was introduced. Free online downloading and disc copying have been widely blamed for the slump in sales.
Sony's system will use the ultra-efficient data compression system used in MiniDiscs, to squeeze 30 hours of MP3 music onto a single blank CD. The discs will play on a new generation of personal stereos, which cost less than £100. Philips's system uses a computer DVD recorder to save at least 100 hours of MP3 music on a blank DVD, which will play on a new portable DVD player.
Business model
Why Sony should want to launch a recorder that might make piracy easier may seem surprising, as its Sony Music division makes and sells CDs. While Sony Music did not want to comment on its sister company's launch, Mike Tsurumi, a president of Sony Consumer Electronics in Berlin, insists that the move makes sense. "The music companies need to change their business model," he says.
Tsurumi's colleague Simon Mori expects people to move towards downloading and paying for music from official music websites. One such site, dotmusic.com, was launched last week by telecoms company BT and 30 record firms, though at £1.49 per track, buying music this way is hardly cheap.
The International Federation for the Phonographic Industry, which is relentless in its pursuit of music pirates, has not yet said how it will react to the new recorders.
Christy Smith (left) is not using sign language on “Survivor,” which troubles some in the deaf community.
If Christy Smith, the first disabled competitor on Survivor, thinks she's facing adversity in the Brazilian jungle, wait till she gets back home and faces some of her deaf fans.
As the newest and most visible deaf celebrity on TV, Smith, 24, has become a magnet not only for praise, but also scathing criticism.
On one hand, the deaf community is proud of the Colorado native who is a graduate of Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., the world's only liberal-arts college for the deaf.
But on the other, many deaf people are angry that she is not openly displaying more pride in deaf culture. They want her to use sign language when she speaks, and to teach other members of her all- female tribe how to sign.
They are particularly critical of her choosing to read lips and speak instead of insisting on a sign-language interpreter during the Darwinian game show. Those choices are particularly insulting to strong proponents of deaf culture.
"I was so excited when I learned she was going to be on the show," said Kristy Griffin, a youth specialist at the Pennsylvania School for the Deaf in Germantown. Speaking through a sign-language interpreter, the classroom aide said she had looked forward to the first episode.
"Then, whoa! She's not signing, she's speaking. I told my husband that I was sure she'd have a sign interpreter at Tribal Council, so I waited and waited and she didn't. It's so not deaf-friendly."
The show does not allow journalists to interview contestants until they've been voted off. Smith is still in the competition.
The tug-of-war between signing and speaking has long been a sensitive issue in the deaf community. Many deaf-culture advocates believe that hearing-impaired people who read lips and speak are acquiescing to the expectations of the hearing world.
The deaf community is often split between those who embrace a deaf lifestyle - using sign language and considering themselves similar to an ethnic minority - and those who emphasize assimilation into the mainstream.
"Deaf people should be proud of signing," said Fred Turner, 16, a ninth grader at the Pennsylvania school, where both students and teachers have been watching the show closely. "Be proud of being deaf."
"It's almost like she doesn't want people to know she's deaf," said Billy Hartman, also in ninth grade. "I guess I'm kind of hurt."
Some in the deaf community have questioned whether Smith, who signed on her audition tape and during preproduction interviews, was pressured into reading lips by CBS.
"It was completely her decision," said Colleen Sullivan, director of prime-time series at CBS. "We left it up to her on how she wanted to handle it."
But, Sullivan said, the network did not offer to provide a sign-language interpreter for Smith during the competition, which now has six women against six men.
"We had the discussion with her in advance," Sullivan said. "We said, 'Do you think it's fair that you participate without an interpreter?' And she said, 'No, but life isn't fair and I want to do it.' "
On the first episode, Feb. 13, Smith did not tell the others on her team of her deafness until they were encamped. The men are still not aware of her disability.
"She knew she was going to spark controversy," Smith's mother said in a phone interview. "When she's in the deaf world, she doesn't voice at all. I guess on the show she didn't want to stand out because it's about survival, right?"
Raised by hearing parents, Glenda and Bob Smith, in Basalt, Colo., Smith was diagnosed as severely hearing-impaired when she was about 6 months old.
"She was a preemie and so we knew she was in danger of having physical problems," Glenda Smith said. "She's had hearing aids since she was 2 years old. She can hear some sounds, but not much."
As a child, Smith was not exposed to deaf culture and did not use sign language.
"We live in a rural community," her mother said. "We chose at the time to integrate her with lip-reading and speech therapy." But, she said, her daughter grew to feel isolated and unhappy.
"She came home from school one day her sophomore year and said, 'I'm never going back to that school again. You have to decide where to send me.' "
She finished her high school years at the private academy in Washington that is associated with Gallaudet, and went on to college there.
That is where Christy Smith embraced deaf culture.
"I know all this controversy about signing or not signing going on in the deaf community seems stupid to hearing people," Glenda Smith said. "But it's very real."
Judging from the charged messages being exchanged in Internet chat rooms and on Survivor: The Amazon fan Web sites, Smith's participation in the show has fanned flames in both the hearing and deaf worlds.
"Yes, deaf people do have their role in society and can be extraordinary people, but the bottom line, as cruel as it may sound, is that Survivor is about dealing primarily with communication," wrote someone called JaiPeur on a chat site called Survivor Sucks (which is actually for fans of the program). "... It seems to me deaf people might struggle on Survivor."
"You need to show them that you can do it, Deaf!" a chatter called Survivor Tikis replied. "Deaf, you can establish pride for the disabled!"
Some deaf chatters have argued that it would make no sense for Smith to sign on the program because none of the other contestants knows sign language.
Jennifer Peterson, Smith's best friend from college, agrees.
"I tell people, 'What if you were placed in the middle of nowhere, in the woods, with a bunch of hearing people? Would you sign with them? No,' " she said. "But that aside, we're all so proud. Christy being on the show is an amazing milestone for the deaf community... . She's educating the world about an invisible disability."
Take this tech job and shove it Sure, there are plenty of opportunities out there -- if you have 10 years of experience and are willing to work for free.
- - - - - - - - - - - - By Farhad Manjoo
Last summer, Tanya Bershadsky, a Web designer in her 20s who has worked in the up-and- down tech industry since the mid-1990s, was laid off from a big-name dot-com that unsurprisingly went belly up. Like a couple million others in her situation, Bershadsky quickly started looking for a new job and, like everyone else, her search didn't go very well.
Bershadsky discovered that it was possible to find dozens of job listings for the sort of work she was looking for. The trouble was, most of the advertised positions required prospective employees to have a skill set that rivaled Superman's -- you not only needed expertise in Flash and Java, but your new bosses also preferred that you'd graduated first in your class from MIT, knew how to shoot and edit and encode video, were "glamorous," typed 70 words per minute, took dictation and would perhaps wash the executive's car and feed his dog once in a while. Many times, the ads asked for intimate knowledge of the inner workings of some specialized world -- the cosmetic industry, say, or the French Foreign Ministry.
The worst part, Bershadsky found, was that several postings warned that employees should not only be qualified to do a job, but that they be "excited" and "passionate" about it -- a requirement that Bershadsky found difficult to fulfill because "80 percent of the jobs I was seeing posted, with these outrageous requirements, were unpaid internships," she says. "These were internships that required you to have three or four years of experience. What kind of shit is that?"
After a couple months of this, Bershadsky had had enough; she wanted to do something about the jobs she was seeing. So she went to a domain-name registration service and bought a URL for a new site she thought would, if not exactly make a difference in the world, at least make her feel better. The URL Bershadsky registered was fuckthatjob.com. "It was exactly what I was feeling," she says. "It felt right. I couldn't think of anything else to call it."
Bershadsky had a simple idea for the new site. She asked her close friends, many of whom were also looking for jobs, to send her the most outrageous postings they spotted; she would put up the listings and add snarky comments about the employers behind them.
She was quickly inundated with examples of over-the-top job requirements. There was, for instance, the film editor who wanted an assistant to help him finish a project -- the assistant would get no pay, and would need to provide his own editing equipment. Or there was a marketing firm in need of a "team player" to work as a copywriter. The applicant, who would be an unpaid intern, had to know HTML, Photoshop, Fireworks, Dreamweaver, PHP, JavaScript and "search engine optimization." The company wanted this person to have four years of marketing experience, and work for about 20 hours a week. The position was perfect, the ad said, for people who had "a desire to keep their skills polished during a lapse in employment. In other words, if you haven't been able to find a job and want to stay 'in the marketing loop', this is a great way to do so."
Fuckthatjob.com, currently making the rounds of the unemployed, provides a good window onto the dismal reality of the current tech job market. If one needed any proof, the jobs on the site -- as well as interviews with several people now looking for work -- indicate that we're now in an employer-dominated labor market. Employers will ask for the world from their employees, and often they'll come close to getting it, and for very little money.
It's a sad time to be looking for tech work. Three years have passed since the Nasdaq stock index closed at 5,048.62 -- which turned out to be its apex, the high- water mark of the late-1990s economic boom. Nothing has picked up for tech workers in that time, and many of them seem gloomier than ever about their prospects. "It seems like everybody I used to know in this industry has got some unbelievable story that isn't getting told," says Bill Lessard, the founder of Netslaves, a site that chronicled, through the good times and bad, worker exploitation in the tech economy.
Lessard is now halfheartedly looking for a job himself, but he's all but given up hope of finding something in technology. "I think that these job postings are indicative of just how truly crazy things have gotten. And the fact is that none of this is funny anymore; this is not just a fad story anymore. The fact of the matter is that the economy is awful -- there's no other way to put it."
Since the economy hit its peak employment rate about two years ago, more than 2 million people have lost their jobs, and there's no sign, yet, of a reversal. According to the Labor Department's latest numbers, about 300,000 jobs were cut in February alone. Tech workers across many industries have been among the hardest hit by the economic slump, but anecdotal evidence suggests that there's a specific kind of tech worker -- what some people call the "tech generalist," people who are pretty good at lots of different kinds of technologies, who consider themselves quick learners and can easily fit into new jobs -- who is having the most difficult time these days.
"I think I can do many different kinds of things, but it's like in the current marketplace I'm worthless," says Bill Lessard. The jobs on fuckthatjob.com bear this out, as do many of the listings on most online job boards, he adds. "They say you have to be able to do five things within a specified industry. You can do databases and graphics. You can do marketing and network administration. And whatever you do you have to have three to five years of experience working with cosmetics for elderly women."
Teresa Guerriero, who has worked as a director of application development for firms in several different industries, and considers herself flexible enough to learn new businesses, expressed a similar frustration. "They say they want you to have all these skills, plus you have to have experience in merchandising or retail or the pharmaceutical industry," she says.
Guerriero, who was laid off seven months ago, is not the sort of dot-com youngster who made millions in the last boom. She has a daughter in high school and a mortgage to worry about. But that background hasn't helped her much in the job market. She's been granted only three interviews since she began her search, a number that disappoints her greatly.
"I'm panicked now," she said, when asked about her state of mind. "I'm through my severance, and I'm slowly making my way through my savings. I thought it would take me six or seven months to find a job, and that's where I am now. But in order to feel some hope I would have had to have had a number of interviews by now, and I haven't. Although I send out a lot of résumés and I'll answer many ads, you're discouraged from sending your résumé in if you don't have 14 of the 15 things they want. If you were responsible for application development in the past, they now want you to be responsible for application development and networking and a dozen other things."
"I don't think anybody's afraid of working hard," she added, "but I was very surprised at the expectations they had."
Although technologists have had a hard time in this slump, their plight has been the least pitied. Much of the coverage of the new economy's souring has had the flavor of a morality play. Dot-com workers are portrayed as victims of their own outsized ambitions, greedy kids who lucked into a pot of gold they hadn't really earned. They flew too close to the sun, and got what was coming to them.
"You go from one exaggerated position to another exaggerated position. It used to be you go to cocktail parties and if they found out you worked in technology they'd say you must be rich, must be a genius," Lessard says. "Now it's like, 'You poor slob, you fool.' Everybody's waiting for you to jump out the window."
Tanya Bershadsky says, "It's kind of embarrassing to tell people you worked on the Web. It's got this weird stigma attached to it now -- when you say what you do, people know you're unemployed. It's like when you meet someone in New York and they say they're an actor, you know they're not working on anything."
Justin Market, a 25-year-old programmer in San Francisco, embodies the shopworn stereotype of the dot-com youngster who seemed to get everything too easily. (The name is a pseudonym; he didn't want his real name published, for fear that prospective employers might question his love of the software industry, which he is thinking about leaving entirely.) Six years ago, Market dropped out of college -- school was no match for the fortunes being minted in the Internet industry. It turned out to be a pretty good decision. Market founded a company that was eventually purchased by WebMD, and, when that company went public, he became an instant millionaire.
When he was 22, Market sold some of his stock to buy an $800,000 house in the city. "I listened to everyone but my accountant," he says now, "and I didn't put enough away for taxes." He has been out of work since early last year, and has about $300 in his bank account. He's trying to sell his house, which he thinks is worth a bit more than $1 million; most of the money he gets from that will go to pay the IRS. He owes "piles and piles" in taxes, he says.
Market's job search, so far, has been less successful than he'd hoped. "It used to be that if you were a smart programmer and could pick things up easily, they wanted to hire you," he says. "Now they want you to have done exactly what the last person in that job has done." The average salary on offer is smaller as well. At his last job, Market was making about $125,000 a year -- which he concedes is large sum for someone his age. These days, "the jobs I'm looking at are $80,000 or $90,000 for full-time," he says. "These are for actual development jobs, which I have a lot of experience in. I've written two books on Java."
Since the start of this year, there has been a slight increase in the number of viable postings available, Market says. He has sent in his résumé to dozens of firms, and has had "a handful" of interviews. But he hasn't received any offers yet.
Market is only looking for a temporary job, one he plans to keep for a year or so, just until he gets himself settled financially. During his last few months of unemployment, he discovered, he says, a new way to live -- a life of meditation and reflection, less troubled by the need to make money and spend it. Market teaches yoga now, and he thinks it's what he wants to do permanently. He's also taken up cooking; he finds that he can make better food than most of the expensive restaurants he used to frequent.
"I see myself being happier now," he says. "It's hard being financially pretty strapped, but I don't have the same stresses that I used to, I don't have the same constant push to acquire shit that I did. Before, I needed more and more stuff, like buying this house, and I've bought all sorts of expensive artwork. You know, I just had this money! You go from having $1,000 in your bank account to having a portfolio worth more than $1 million -- it was just there, and I spent it. But I learned a lot from it, and it was a lesson I had to learn. Things came so easy for me before."
Many other tech workers said they planned to get out of the technology field as well. Tanya Bershadsky now wants to work as a publicist. "When the Web economy collapsed, I felt that I had to reinvent myself," she says. Now she's doing some part-time P.R. work, but permanent work in that industry isn't easy to come by, either. There are several entertainment-industry job boards that allow workers to pay to get early access to new listings, and Bershadsky has willingly done so. It might seem exploitative, she agrees, but in a tight job market, any small edge can help.
Bill Lessard has been writing a book about the technology boom, "Netslaves 2.0: Tales of Surviving the Great Tech Gold Rush," which will be released later this month. But for much of the time he's been unemployed he's worked part-time at a catering company. "I think a lot of people are underemployed like that, and are really in a bizarre situation," he says.
"I remember one time they sent me out before New Year's Eve to place flyers under people's windshield wipers, and this seagull took a crap on me. And I'm like, here's symbolism for you. But you laugh, man, you have to laugh. I'm not feeling sorry for myself. I'm proud of what I've done with my life. I was part of the construction of the Internet, which is the greatest thing since the light bulb as far as I'm concerned."
Let's be honest here: there's a whole crowd in Europe that can't get over its disappointment that the wrong side won the Cold War, and that even lesser-path communism (that is, Euro-socialism) has been shown up as a failure. That's what this [opposition to an Iraq war] is all about, really.
I was immediately concerned, and I asked some of my European co-workers this series of questions:
Since Europe is a failure, would you like to give up your universal health care and trade it in for a system in which 25% of all children go uncovered—and, oh by the way, you will get booted out of the hospital two hours after having surgery.
Since Europe is practicing lesser-path communism, would you like to give up your five weeks vacation and trade it in for two weeks a year, like they do in successful countries.
Since Europe is afraid to deliver a SmackDown to a swarthy dictator, would you like to trade in all of your social workers, who nip problems in the bud, for a penitentiary-industrial complex in which you spend 100 times more on police, prisons, courts, and insurance. You’re crime rate will quadruple, but no worries, just lose all of those wussy gun laws, and you’ll feel as safe as houses.
Since Europe is practicing a scorched earth class warfare policy against its top 1% of the population, would you like to trade in your Marxist-Leninist system of six months paid maternity (and often Paternity) leave for a more capitalist friendly system of no paid leave.
Since Europe needs to start speaking English and only English, would you like to get rid of your free pre-school child-care system and replace it with—well--nothing.
Since Europe needs to start practicing compassionate conservatism, would you like to lose all those eco-friendly policies you are always bragging about and just rip up the whole Kyoto Treaty and instead live life to the fullest, at any cost.
While lots of my colleagues mentioned how nice Americans are individually and how beautiful the geographical features of the country are, alas, to a person, they were all happy to continue just being failures.
A remotely piloted aircraft that the United States has warned could spread chemical weapons appears to be made of balsa wood and duct tape, with two small propellors attached to what look like the engines of a weed whacker.
[...]
In Washington's search for a "smoking gun" that would prove Iraq is not disarming, Powell has insisted the drone, which has a wingspan of 24.5 feet, could be fitted to dispense chemical and biological weapons. He has said it "should be of concern to everybody."
The drone's white fuselage was emblazoned Wednesday with the words "God is great" and the code "Quds-10." Its balsa wood wings were held together with duct tape. Officials said they referred to the remotely piloted vehicle as the RPV-30A.
Latif said the plane is controlled by the naked eye from the ground. Asked whether its range is above the 93-mile limit imposed by the United Nations, he said it couldn't be controlled from more than five miles.
Now this may all be Iraqi disinformation, but if the duct-taped drone is the same one discussed by Powell, it would be another nail in the coffin bearing Powell's credibility, and that of the US.
(Thanks to reader BM for the heads-up.)
Comments: Iraqi "drone" made of duct tape
Another indication that folks in the Administration have been sniffing too much model glue.
Posted byBraganat March 12, 2003 08:34 AM
Why wouldn't the Iraqis just go ahead and attack us with the small balsa wood gliders that are powered by rubber bands? They could strap a vial of some sort of chemical agent to the underside and let 'em go. Of course, if the wind shifted, the planes could crash on their helmets, thereby creating a friendly fire incident. Or, how about those rockets you pump up creating water pressure and then releasing the rocket. Maybe you could put a small warhead on one of those. In fact, just yesterday I saw someone of Middle Eastern origin in the toy isle at WalMart...
Posted byVA6thDemat March 12, 2003 08:39 AM
"Now this may all be Iraqi disinformation, but if the duct-taped drone is the same one discussed by Powell, it would be another nail in the coffin bearing Powell's credibility, and that of the US."
How many more nails do we need?
Posted byjdwat March 12, 2003 08:43 AM
VA6thDem:
Don't forget the possibility of the Iraqi attacking us with paper airplanes. Think about it, every scrap of paper in Iraq is potentially a missile that could carry anthrax spores. The Iraqis could construct large wind machines that would greatly increase their range. God, I'm going to have trouble sleeping knowing they must have millions of these things ready to launch.
Posted byJJBat March 12, 2003 08:46 AM
BM is a wealth of information! They posted a link the other day that lead me to this remarkable PNAC letter that was mentioned in the Prime Ministers question this morning.
As for the drone, I can't wait to hear what Blix has to say about it!
Posted bypixieat March 12, 2003 08:48 AM
I think we better have Blix start looking for inordinately large rubber bands in Iraq as they could launch WMD at the US.
Posted bynofundyat March 12, 2003 08:52 AM
For some reason it reminds me of the Radioactive Man movie episode of the Simpsons when, in order to get the scene to look realistic, they painted a horse to look like a cow.
Lisa asked, "Well what happens when you need a horse?"
The man answers, "We usually tape a bunch of cats together."
Posted byflanagan doeat March 12, 2003 08:56 AM
JJB... you're right! Now I'm worried. But what worries me more are the Estes rocket kits. Has Tom Ridge been monitoring the inventory of the kits? Gosh, with two or three propellant cartridges in one of those suckers, no telling how far they would go. And finding their mobile launchers would be real tough.
Posted byVA6thDemat March 12, 2003 08:57 AM
Look, people, this is serious.
We can't afford to have people wasting duct tape. It's the key ingredient in our WMD preparedness plan.
This entire crisis/war is being foisted upon us by the duct tape lobby.
It's all so clear now.
Posted byBriVTat March 12, 2003 09:10 AM
Pixie,
I can't wait to hear what Leno and Letterman have to say about it!
Posted byalfat March 12, 2003 09:12 AM
jdw has it right. "How many more nails do we need?" Powell proved long ago he is just another GOP scumbag.
Posted byTin Soldierat March 12, 2003 09:13 AM
Duct Tape, the Context Sensitive Multi-Use Wonder Weapon
* In the US, the Tape halts the course of Chem and Bio death clouds; in Iraq the same Tape sends Chem and Bio death clouds aloft.
* Do you suppose the Iraqis sourced their Context Sensitive Multi-Use Wonder Weapons from France? Ecuador, a major exporter of Balsa, has been strangely silent during these past few months of discussion regarding Iraq and WMDs...
* This also reminds one of the rice paper ballons the Japanese employed in WWII to float WMDs across the Pacific and into the heartland. Although rice paper is a favorite material of hobbyists (particularly kite builders), there's no indication of a hobbyist-Iraq partnership in this case (since rice paper, apparently, was not used in the drone's construction). The Japanese, however, might have some explaining to do; they may not have provided contemporary, real-world engineering assistance, but clearly the drone's Iraqi designers received inspiration from somewhere.
People have been saying for years that Microsoft is spying on people using Windows. People have been spouting crazy sounding theories about how Microsoft knows what is on your computer, knows what movies you are watching, and is installing software over the internet without your knowledge. Those people are usually dismissed as kooks and paranoids, and are often challenged to "run a port sniffer and see for yourself". Well, it seems that a lot of people have a lot of crow to eat, because as it turns out, Microsoft really is spying on its users, and they've been caught at it red-handed.
German tech news portal tecchannel is reporting that when users of Windows XP use the Windows Update web site, it transmits a list of installed software and the hardware configuration of the machine to Microsoft. Using custom-built software which takes advantage of an undocumented function of the Windows API, tecchannel has logged the data being transmitted to Microsoft just before it is encrypted. Their testing also reveals that Microsoft can identify your machine uniquely if they chose to do so, and could even lock you out of the site altogether.
The first six pages of the article are free. This is a subscription web site, so the complete article is not available to non-subscribers, but you can buy the article in pdf format for $2. When you buy the article, they also send you the custom software they used to log this activity. Since there is absolutely no doubt that a future "update" from Microsoft will disable the undocumented API function used to gather this evidence, they provide no support for the software.
This shouldn't really be a surprise. As I said, people have been saying it for years, but there is always the naive majority who refuse to believe that these sorts of abuses happen until the hard evidence is rubbed in their face. Last year rumors circulated that Microsoft's Windows Media Player was spying on them by sending back information of the music they listened to and the movies they watched. As before, the uninformed refused to believe the rumors, ridiculing those making the suggestions rather than investigating for themselves.
An investigation by noted privacy advocate Richard Smith found proof that once again, the rumors were true. Using a port sniffer, Smith found that each time a DVD movie is played on a computer which is online, Media Player 8, which ships with all copies of Windows XP, contacts a Microsoft web server to get title and chapter information for the DVD. In violation of Microsoft's stated privacy policy, the server was setting a cookie with a unique identification code that enabled Microsoft to track what DVDs were being played on that particular computer. Rather than acknowledge that they had violated the privacy of their users, Microsoft merely shrugged and said "oops" before updating their privacy policy to include the behavior that they had been caught engaging in.
This wasn't the first time Microsoft has been caught lying in its privacy policy. Last year, an FTC investigation concluded that Microsoft made false promises about how secure it kept the consumer information it collected. The Director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection at the FTC, Howard Beales, said that Microsoft had been collecting information about the day and time consumers logged into participating Passport Web sites without their knowledge, and storing data for longer than it claimed.
It wasn't the first time it's happened, and it won't be the last time it happens. I am sure that the next time someone tries to warn people that Microsoft is doing something wrong, the same people who blindly refuse to listen will again display their ignorance with taunts and insults. History is full of examples of people reacting to theories that disagree with their own beliefs by ridiculing those who come up with them. In the end, no one looks more foolish than those who use childish insults as a substitute for intelligent argument. Keep that in mind the next time someone warns about privacy being invaded.
Much talk has sprung from Richard Perle's comments yesterday on CNN's Late Edition. He was asked about a New Yorker article by Seymour Hersh that was critical of Perle, and said, "Sy Hersh is the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist."
We read it, and it implies that Perle is co-mingling his defense policy work with his business interests - although more needs to be learned to make a definitive judgment. What did Hersh's article tell us? That the following connections exist:
Thanks to Cursor.org for alerting us to this issue (and Atrios too).
UPDATE: Atrios reminds us that Khashoggi has a connection to Theresa LePore of Palm Beach butterfly ballot fame, so we've added that item.
The new Russian duo TATU, formed by two teenage Russian lesbians, Lena Katina and Julia Volkova, has taken the music world by storm reaching number one in most music charts around the globe. Feisty brunette Julia and soulful redhead Lena, two teenage girls from Moscow are the Russian equivalent of pop-meets-prodigy.
The popularity of the girls did not stop in the West but also made its way to the heart of the Middle East with record sales. TATU’s music, considered to be the most eminent and promising project in Russian youth pop-music, addresses issues that are a metaphor of societal pressure, themes about repression, desire, and the consequences of tough choices regarding one’s sexuality.
Fans claim their music has become popular among youths worldwide due to the fact that they give their listeners the freedom to express themselves and openly admit that many have a trait of homosexuality in them and should express it freely.
Their music had also won the hearts of many Middle Eastern youths who feel repressed due to social pressures and traditions. The idea of two girls demonstrating their homosexuality has also appealed to many Middle Eastern males as being something out of the ordinary. Females who are more bounded by social standards and parental controls felt they could break free from a world that has tied them down.
According to a record storeowner in the Emirate of Dubai, “ TATU have been popular for a much longer time down here than anywhere else due to the large Russian community that lives here. They have received a lot of airtime on the radio stations down here due to the amount of requests these stations receive, which ultimately has pushed their CD sales to record levels.”
Tearing down walls of all sorts throughout world, TATU became the most explosive and controversial act in Eastern Europe especially after the release of their single "Ya Soshla S Uma" ("All The Things She Said"), the story of a love affair between two young girls, whose evocative video was named MTV Russia's Video of the Year. 200 km/h in the Wrong Lane, TATU’s 2001 debut album on Universal Music Russia, sold more than 1,000,000 copies.
The girls’ embrace of lesbianism -and each other in the rain- soaked school uniforms, with hands clasped and lips locked at various times -in their video, "All the Things She Said", reflect a metaphor about societal pressure.
‘200 km’ is exciting to a certain degree, but thought- provoking throughout with consistent themes about repression, desire, and the consequences of tough choices, reflects how boldly these two teenagers put society's taboos in the open.
TATU is sincere and honest about themselves and others, refusing to shape themselves according to people. They express what they feel freely without limitations or borders. The girls feel that those who attend their concerts or listen to their music are able to break free from social standards and barriers and are able to express their sexuality more openly.
TATU was formed in 2000 by the former psychologist and advertising executive Ivan Shapovalov, who is now producer of the group. Shapovalov glanced out at a sea of suggestive teen pop and experienced an epiphany, and came together TATU. His goal was to inject a stagnant genre with new forbidden fruits, pushing buttons and ruffling feathers, but stopping just short of being outright lewd.
Julia and Lena had already known each other for several years, while performing for another music group when they came together for TATU two years ago. Both had also studied music formally for 8 years.
Julia is a child of middle-class parents; Lena, the youngest of three, is the daughter of a well-known musician/pop- songwriter father. "We love each other very much but Lena is totally different from me," says Julia, who has also acted in small films. "She doesn't like to party; I like to party. She's more quiet, reads a lot. I don't like reading." Yet, the contrasts between sweet, dramatic Lena and energetic, in-your-face Julia complement each other in TATU.
Lena Katina was born on October 4th, 1984, Yulia Volkova on February 20th, 1985. Both Lena and Julia sang in a children’s group “Neposedy”. Julia had to leave the group after she was accused of “obscene behavior and corrupting other singers”. The girls came together to the audition that took place on the Mosfilm studio. They were one of the 500 teens auditioning, but were selected independently and formed their band but under the then name of “Project” which was later changed to TATU - abbreviations from the Russian words: "Ta liubit etu" (Russian for ‘This Girl Loving That Girl’).
The two girls have also concrete views on political issues. As a result of their anti-war actions, Americans now know, what Russian slogan " XYII to war! " means...
In the popular Jay Leno's Tonight Show on NBC TATU sang late last month "All The Things She Said". The girls performed while wearing T-shirts with an anti-war slogan written in Russian. In that way, the girls have expressed their personal attitude to the expected U.S.-led war in Iraq.
According to Fred Felman, vice president of marketing at Zone Labs, ZoneAlarm "shuts down Internet connectivity instead of losing control of the system" when an unauthorized application tries to send information from a user's PC.
After years of worrying about viruses and trojans, users have a new nemesis: spyware. This term refers to any program that distributes information from a user's computer without that user's knowledge.
To be sure, most of this software is more annoying than harmful. However, as Jamie Garrison, co-owner of Aluria Software, which produces the spyware stopper, put it, "Some spyware can ruin your life. It's that invasive."
So, what can a user do to avoid the onslaught of underhanded tracking programs?
The Spyware Menace
Garrison said the most pressing issue related to spyware is that people do not take it seriously enough. Part of the problem is awareness. Many people are only now finding out about spyware. "Few users are aware that everything they do on the Net or even while not connected to the Internet can be tracked," Ken Lloyd, lead developer at Aluria, told NewsFactor.
After all, spyware can range from a stealthy program that runs in the background, transmitting your surfing habits to a company for marketing purposes, to keylogging software installed by a spouse to monitor communications.
"Well over 85 percent of people have spyware on their computer," Lloyd said.
Programs That Fight It
Gartner analyst Richard Stiennon told NewsFactor that while antivirus products from companies like McAfee and Symantec can be used to detect spyware, the user is also an important ingredient in stopping spyware. He or she must recognize spyware programs -- and know enough to remove them -- when they are detected.
Of course, most users do not know much about spyware. Stiennon recommended that users get a desktop firewall program that blocks unwanted outgoing connections. Then, even if spyware is running, it will be unable to connect to a server to transmit information.
One personal firewall, ZoneAlarm, can make sure spyware cannot communicate with the outside world. According to Fred Felman, vice president of marketing at Zone Labs, ZoneAlarm "shuts down Internet connectivity instead of losing control of the system" when an unauthorized application tries to send information from a user's PC. Felman told NewsFactor that ZoneAlarm allows users to specify which programs are allowed to send and receive data over the network. Users even can restrict programs to certain ports or domains.
And in addition to antivirus vendors and personal firewalls, a number of companies like Aluria make spyware detection and removal software.
Arms Race
Even when a person recognizes spyware on his or her computer, removing it may be tricky business. According to Garrison, some spyware manages to "embed" itself into the software Windows uses to provide TCP/IP (Internet networking) services. She said that removing such spyware "actually removes your Internet connection. It's fixable, but it's a real pain."
This makes sense, considering that malware authors are always trying to stay one step ahead of users and spyware stoppers. The latest rash of annoyware consists of programs that send pop-ups to instant messaging programs like MSN Messenger. Even more irritating, many of those pop-ups simply inform users that they are vulnerable to unwanted messages.
And it gets worse: Stiennon said that programs being sold to block this plague of IM pop-ups are scams, too. "Just go into the admin functions in the control panel [and do it yourself]," he said, noting that the program vendors are taking advantage of people who do not know they can turn off the function by themselves.
The Perils of Free
In fact, according to Garrison, most spyware is installed by users voluntarily, even if they do not know it. She blames free products like Grokster and Kazaa for piggybacking spyware onto users' computers, though she noted that it is all disclosed in the fine print. "Here's the really dirty part of it. Let's say you go out and download a free program. It's almost certainly going to have spyware.... Very rarely does spyware get on your computer without your consent."
So, what is the solution? "Stop using free products... Don't download it if it's free."
Lloyd agreed. "The latest trend for software companies is to give their software away for free. By doing this they bundle ad software within it. They usually tell the customer in the EULA (end user license agreement) ... that some additional ad-tracking software will be installed, but they bury it so deep that the average person has no idea."
It's the User
In addition, Garrison said, most users have themselves to blame for spam. "They say yes to it in their user agreement."
Felman noted that users also need to be conscious of human engineering. "It's interesting; we talk about the automated way that people do this, [but] there might be a bigger risk in the human factor." Felman mentioned scams that depend on users not paying close attention and providing information to third parties about usernames and passwords. "I got an e-mail from an organization purporting to be Drugstore.com, and it looked a lot like other e-mails I've gotten from Drugstore.com, using images from their server but the text asking for my username and password."
Ultimately, the solution to stopping spyware -- and other scame -- lies with the user. Spyware removal and detection software can be useful, but the best way to fight it is by making sure it is not installed on your computer in the first place. In the end, as Garrison said, the best spyware-stopper is an informed computer user.
A Scottish law firm is counting the cost of a damaging hoax email that someone has sent to thousands of addresses, purporting to be from a prominent partner at the firm who promises to be a "ruthless bastard" and "screw the opposition" on behalf of his clients in legal proceedings.
The short, four-line email was sent out earlier this week and made to look like it came from legal practice Blackadders, which is based in Dundee. It is signed-off with the real phone number, name and email address of one of the firm's most experienced lawyers.
It reads: "If you want to raise a Civil Court action against someone anywhere in Scotland then I am your man. I am a ruthless bastard and I will screw the opposition to the wall even if it means bending a few rules."
Blackadders told silicon.com that the matter is now with Tayside police who are working with the firm's IT department. The company apologises to anyone who has received the email and stresses it was sent from a Hotmail address - probably using email address generating software favoured by spammers - and not by an employee.
Scott Williamson, Blackadder partner with responsibility for IT, told silicon.com: "This is clearly an attempt to discredit our reputation. We're not jumping to any conclusions as to who's behind it. It could be a former client, someone who came out second best in a court action - potentially one of thousands of people."
Blackadders has provided email header information to the police, who are now requesting ISPs release data relevant to the case.
Williamson said he doubts the culprit will be caught and added: "What's scary is how this was so easy to do. Any business affected by this kind of thing must realise the ongoing implications."
As well as adversely affecting the company's reputation, the law firm is dealing with bounced back emails from the original spam list as well as written replies - some in themselves offensive - asking why the partner in question would send such an email.
GEORGE Bush pulled out of a speech to the European Parliament when MEPs wouldn't guarantee a standing ovation.
Senior White House officials said the President would only go to Strasbourg to talk about Iraq if he had a stage-managed welcome.
A source close to negotiations said last night: "President Bush agreed to a speech but insisted he get a standing ovation like at the State of the Union address.
"His people also insisted there were no protests, or heckling.
"I believe it would be a crucial speech for Mr Bush to make in light of the opposition here to war. But unless he only gets adulation and praise, then it will never happen."
Mr Bush's every appearance in the US is stage-managed, with audiences full of supporters.
It was hoped he would speak after he welcomed Warsaw pact nations to Nato in Prague last November. But his refusal to speak to EU leaders face-to-face is seen as a key factor in the split between the US-UK coalition and Europe.
The source added: "Relations between the EU and the US are worsening fast - this won't help."
On the subject of North Korea, there are two groups of people in Washington today: People who are terrified, and people who aren't paying attention. Unfortunately, the latter category seems to include the president of the United States.
In recent days, Pyongyang has begun an escalating series of military provocations. On February 20, a North Korean fighter jet crossed into South Korean airspace, leading Seoul to scramble its own jets and put a missile battery on high alert. On February 24, North Korea greeted the inauguration of South Korea's new president by launching an anti-ship missile into the Sea of Japan. And, on March 1, North Korean MiGs trailed a U.S. spy plane for 22 minutes, the first such incident since 1969. "If an encounter like this happens again," a former North Korean general told The Washington Post, "I think they will shoot down the U.S. plane. North Koreans don't have any fear of war."
But all this pales before the provocation looming in the distance: Pyongyang's reopening of the Yongbyon nuclear reprocessing plant. U.S. spy satellites show feverish activity around the long- dormant site, and Bush administration officials say they expect it will be reopened within weeks. "Once they start reprocessing," an American official recently told The New York Times' David Sanger, "it's a [nuclear] bomb a month from now until summer." Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage told Congress in February that North Korea might well sell that nuclear material to "a non- state actor or a rogue state."
Not long ago, administration officials were telling journalists that the reopening of Yongbyon was a "red line." More recently, as Pyongyang has gotten closer to crossing it, the Bush team has taken a more accommodating line--suggesting that the plant's reactivation will jolt North Korea's neighbors into finally applying serious diplomatic pressure on Pyongyang. But that's probably a pipe dream. Once North Korea starts turning spent fuel rods into plutonium, its willingness to negotiate away Yongbyon will dramatically diminish. And, if it becomes clear that diplomatic overtures are worthless, the Bush administration will feel enormous pressure to do something to prevent Pyongyang from producing bombs that could end up in Al Qaeda's hands.
Already, hawks inside and outside the Bush administration are tiptoeing in the direction of a preemptive strike. In the March issue of Commentary, Joshua Muravchik writes, "Not only does the North's belligerence leave us no choice but to `think' about war, we cannot exclude the possibility of initiating military action ourselves." Defense Policy Review Board Chairman Richard Perle recently said the Bush administration needed to consider ways to "neutralize" North Korea's massive military firepower. As the Nelson Report, an influential Washington newsletter on Asian policy, put it last week, "The dirty little secret ... is that some Bush hard-liners not only are willing to risk war, they think that if the U.S. pushes hard enough, N. Korea will prove to be a paper tiger and swiftly collapse." When Pyongyang begins building nukes and the U.S. military is done toppling Saddam, that dirty little secret will become a full-blown policy option.
Given these circumstances, you'd think the president and his top advisers would be frantic. Instead, they're eerily sanguine. For weeks now, Bush officials have been denying that North Korea's behavior constitutes a "crisis." Secretary of State Colin Powell called Pyongyang's missile test "fairly innocuous" and "not surprising." One Bush official told Sanger that "nothing is happening--and no one knows how we will respond when the bomb-making starts."
The administration would like observers to interpret its calm as steely resolve. But it actually signifies a refusal to face reality. The Bush administration says it wants multilateral talks with Pyongyang and a series of other countries, including South Korea, Russia, China, and Japan. The theory behind this approach is that only a united front among North Korea's neighbors can exert the pressure necessary to convince Kim Jong Il to turn back. But the diplomatic reality is that there is no united front. North Korea adamantly rejects multilateral talks, and South Korea, Russia, and China adamantly refuse to turn the screws. The Bush administration is paying the price for having helped fuel the anti- Americanism that elected an ultra-soft-line president in Seoul last December. And it cannot pull out all the diplomatic stops with Moscow and Beijing since its highest priority is convincing those governments not to veto an Iraq resolution at the Security Council. The unhappy result is that the United States is basically facing this crisis alone.
Recognizing this diplomatic reality means accepting unconditional, one-on-one talks with Pyongyang. There's a modest chance such negotiations could defer the reopening of Yongbyon. (One China insider speculated to Chris Nelson recently that, if the United States made progress in such negotiations, Beijing might use its leverage with Pyongyang to help secure a deal.) But, whether or not such talks avert an international crisis, they would create a domestic political one. For conservatives--who have called Bill Clinton an appeaser and a dupe for his 1994 deal with Kim Jong Il--unconditional, bilateral talks by the Bush administration would constitute something close to a betrayal. Indeed, when senior Bushies seemed to contemplate them last fall, they were roundly denounced on the right. And now the president has reportedly prohibited top officials from even raising the possibility.
The administration may be waiting to begin bilateral talks until after an Iraq war, when presumably it will be in a position of overwhelming domestic political strength. But, by that time, Yongbyon may well be up and running (many experts think North Korea will deliberately start the reactor while the United States is at war), and thus it will probably be too late. Today, when it really matters, the Bush administration effectively has no policy at all.
If the Bush administration does understand that it will eventually have to sit down with Pyongyang, then its current delay represents the inexcusable privileging of politics over national security. If, on the other hand, it has no intention of engaging in such talks, its current stalling tactics may stem from a very different calculation: That the United States can only fight one war at a time. As Stanley Kurtz put it approvingly recently in National Review Online, "If our policy is to strike when we may and must, silence makes a good deal of sense."
This has so far been too chilling an interpretation for most observers. But, in either case, the United States is much closer to the brink than most Americansrealize. And, whether out of political self- interest or ideological zeal, the Bush administration doesn't seem to mind.
wo weeks ago, a group of senior intelligence officials in the Defense Department sat for an hour listening to a briefing by a writer who claims — I am not making this up — that messages encoded in the Hebrew text of the Old Testament provide clues to the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden. One of the officials told me that they had agreed to meet the writer, Michael Drosnin, author of a Nostradamus-style best seller, without understanding that he was promoting Biblical prophecy. Still, rather than shoo him away, they listened politely as he consumed several man-hours of valuable intelligence-crunching time. Apparently he has given similar briefings to top officials of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency.
Maybe we're all a little too desperate these days for a simple formula to explain how our safe world came unhinged. That, as much as anything, may explain one of the more enduring conspiracy theories of the moment, the notion that we are about to send a quarter of a million American soldiers to war for the sake of Israel.
This idea has received only fleeting attention in the mainstream discussion of our looming invasion of Iraq, and it would not deserve more except for three things: (1) The idea that this war is about Israel is persistent and more widely held than you may think. (2) It has interesting ripples in our domestic politics. (3) It has, like many dubious theories, sprouted from a seed of truth. Israel is part of the story. And why shouldn't it be?
The conspiracy theory appears in several variations, ranging from malignant to merely cynical, but it goes something like this: A cadre of pro-Zionist zealots within the Bush administration and among its media chorus (the "amen corner," as the isolationist Pat Buchanan crudely called them last time we threatened Iraq) has long schemed to make the Middle East safer for Israel by uprooting the hostile regime of Saddam Hussein. They have finally succeeded, the theory goes, in pushing their agenda up to the desk of a gullible president.
Exhibit A for this plot is a document entitled "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," prepared in 1996 by a group of American defense thinkers for the hard-line Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. This study proposed an aggressive redirection of Israeli strategy, including a plan for "removing Saddam Hussein from power." Three of the authors of the prescription — Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David Wurmser —are now prominent "embeds" in the Bush administration.
The "Clean Break" group, interestingly, did not call for an American conquest of Saddam. With President Bill Clinton in office, there was little hope of that. They proposed that Israel handle it together with Jordan and Turkey. Jordan's Hashemite dynasty would share the management of Iraq with the Shiites — presumably leaving the fate of the poor Kurds in Turkish hands. As for America, the document proposed that Israel adopt a new policy of self-reliance, immediately declining economic aid and, eventually, military assistance. This was all a bit much, even for the ultranationalist Mr. Netanyahu.
A less conspiracy-minded observer might point out that the longstanding Bushite animosity toward Iraq is complex and hardly secret, and the fact that our interests coincide with Israel's does not mean that a Zionist fifth column has hijacked the president's brain. But that would not satisfy the yearning for a simple story.
Reinforcing this sinister narrative is the suspicion that the presidential mastermind Karl Rove designed the war as shameless pandering to Florida's Jewish voters and to the tens of millions of evangelical Christians who have taken up Israel as a passion. (Many evangelicals love Israel because in their Biblical end-of-days scenario, the gathering of Jews in the Holy Land is necessary for the Second Coming. Inconveniently for the Jews, the story calls for them to either abandon their beliefs or be exterminated in time for the great rapture.)
While the polls show that the attitudes of American Jews on a war with Iraq are not appreciably different from those of the general electorate, most of the big Jewish organizations and many donors (with the important exception of Hollywood donors) are backing war.
I don't for a second believe that Mr. Bush is marching to war to secure the votes of Palm Beach County. But Republican strategists do foresee — and savor — the fact that a victory in Iraq could give the president new inroads with a small but politically active and traditionally Democratic constituency.
"If the policy succeeds in the war and the peace," one Republican strategist said, "then I think you'll see a further tectonic shift of Jewish political support, both in terms of money and votes, toward Bush. That's not why it's being done, but it will be a consequence if they're successful."
Mr. Bush may also be enjoying the way the question of Israel and the Palestinians has sown strife within the antiwar ranks. Michael Lerner, editor of the leftist Jewish magazine Tikkun, says he was blackballed from speaking at an antiwar rally in San Francisco because some of the sponsors refused to have a "pro-Israel" speaker, an incident that prompted considerable gloating among hawks.
You hear lowbrow versions of the it's-really-about-Israel theory at protest rallies, especially in Europe, where selective sympathy for the Palestinians runs high. You can hear more sophisticated versions, sometimes whispered or oblique, among scholars, op-ed writers and politicians. They speak of the "Israel-centric" war on terror or "Sharon's war."
Making the world safer for us — defusing terrorism and beginning to reform a region that is a source of toxic hostility to what we stand for — happens to make the world safer for Israel as well. But the idea that Israel's interests are driving one of the most momentous shifts in America's foreign policy is simple-minded and offensive. (There is also a simple-minded and offensive flip side, which holds that opposition to the war is heavily fueled by anti-Semitism — another sweeping slander with a grain of truth in it.)
What is demonstrably true is that Israelis believe that the war in Iraq is — to use a phrase that is a staple of Jewish satire — good for the Jews. Even though Israel is a likely target of Iraqi reprisals when war breaks out, it is the only country I know of where polls show overwhelming support for an invasion to oust Saddam, preferably sooner.
The administration prefers not to advertise Israel alongside Bulgaria and Spain on its marquee of allied supporters, for the same reason it has gone to tremendous lengths to keep Israel out of the coming war. No one wants to feed the dangerous idea that this is, as the jihad propagandists claim, a war of Americans and Zionists against Arabs and Islam.
There are obvious reasons that Israelis would like to rid the region of a man who trains terrorists and pays blood money to suicide bombers' families. But the deeper explanation, says Stephen Cohen, an analyst at the Israel Policy Forum, is profound despair over the bloody dead end in which Israeli-Palestinian politics sit. A conquest of Iraq offers the prospect that the United States will take the region in hand. It is, to many Israelis, the only hope of change for the better.
In his speech last week to the American Enterprise Institute, President Bush for the first time seemed to embrace this thankless responsibility. He declared that success in Iraq could break the impasse and move Israel and the Palestinians toward the obvious two-state solution. He underscored this as "my personal commitment."
The speech may have been a sop to European opinion, but a successful war would offer Mr. Bush a precious opportunity. A lot of people wish that he had engaged the Palestinian question intensively and earlier, if only to gain some credibility with the Arabs prior to disarming Saddam. But later would still be better than never.
The question is, What will Mr. Bush make of this moment? If the U.S. manages to make a more benign Iraq — and perhaps a chastened Syria — the Israelis could decide to dig in their heels: Our friend Mr. Bush is here, he's on our side; we can now sit tight, wait for the Palestinians to read the handwriting on the walls of Baghdad and maybe offer them half a state.
Or the Americans could seize the opportunity to say to Ariel Sharon, who has shown no prior gift for strategic statesmanship: "We are here now — you know we won't let you down. It's time to roll back the settlements and close a deal."
Will Mr. Bush choose to lead on this? We know now that the man isn't afraid of a big gamble. But we also know that he likes his stories black and white, and no amount of conquest will make the Middle East a simple plot.
Will you also demonstrate and demand "peaceful" actions to cure the abysmal human rights violations of the Iraqi people under the rule of Saddam Hussein?
Or, will you simply forget about us Iraqis once you discredit George W. Bush?
It goes on like this. To be honest, I have serious doubts about an unsigned, anonymous letter like this, which the CS Monitor says breaks their own standards. (What's this guy's job, anyway?) And I certainly don't believe that this argument is a good reason to go to war.
However, I think this is a good reminder to the pro-peace movement of the types of issues we have to keep in mind, and have answers for. I don't want us to forget about the people of Iraq, either. I don't think that bombing them will help -- it hasn't helped us remember the suffering in Afghanistan -- but I think that we need to back peaceful plans to deal with these types of problems.
Posted by Kynn at February 27, 2003 04:30 PM | TrackBack
Comments
I think that article has one major flaw. It's arguement is clearly aimed at peace activists, but ignores the fact that the same arguement applies to those who support a military solution to the situation in Iraq. Killing several hundred thousand people in Iraq and installing a new goverment will not in itself guaranty an improvement in human rights in Iraq, and there is no reason to assume it is impossible to improve human rights in Iraq without using war.
One might as well ask 'What if the war is successful'? Will the Kurds be protected? We've already agreed to allow Turkey to invade northern Iraq to disarm the Kurds. What will the new form of the government be? Who's interests will it serve? How much of the country will be left standing? Who'll pay to rebuild it? How will Iraq repay the loans to rebuild? South America is a good example of the kinds of suffering and poverty that might face the Iraqi people down the road if they are forced to go to the IMF to rebuild after the war. And all of this ignores the fact that hundreds of thousands of people will die if war is waged. These are not just imaginary people in a far off land, these are real human beings who will experience real suffering and death at the hands of the US. How will the survivors feel about the new US backed government if they have lost children, brothers, sisters, parents to our bombs? Iraq is currently a secular government. When war shreds the fabric of society in Iraq, it will fester and become a fertile breeding ground for anti-US sentiments and Islamic fundamentalism. Will Iraq wind up with a human rights record like Saudi Arabia or Pakistan?
I certainly agree that peace activists should also march in support of international human rights. It is a very important issue because it sets the tone for what is acceptable in the international community.
The important thing to remember here is that we are talking about waging a war that will result in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. I question the assumption that we have to deny houndreds of thousands of people the right to live in order to improve human rights in Iraq.
There are many international organizations working on the issue of human rights. If one wants to address human rights in Iraq I would say that is the place to start. Dropping bombs on people should always be a last resort.
Your unnamed writer makes a powerful case for overthrowing the current regime in Baghdad, and he deserves to be questioned on his own terms; that is, what relationship does the Bush administration's push for war have to the hopes of the Iraqi people? If past performance is any indication, there is precious little hope for a resolution that will treat Iraq and its people as more than a photo opportunity, ready to be double-crossed at the administration's convenience. I'm sure that even this is preferable to the continuation of the current horrors, but it's a sad thing to pin a country's hopes on an American government as dishonest and cynical as this one has proven so far. To the Bush administration, other nations, even erstwhile allies, are targets of coercion, vilification and bribery in its quest for global dominance, and Iraqis should not deceive themselves as to the true nature of their moment in the spotlight. I wish them the best of luck, nevertheless, and remind him that the opposition to this American war is not in any way supportive of Saddam Hussein, but part of a global movement that questions the use of military force as a way to settle international disputes. I am under no illusion that this coming campaign can be averted, but the enormous and unprecedented popular outcry against it is a good omen for the future. Our grandchildren may yet say that in retrospect, Mahatma Gandhi was the most important man of the 20th century, not Hitler.
Alternatives between the status quo inspections and full-scale invasion are pretty scarce, but here's at least an attempt at one. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has a proposal for "A New Approach: Coercive Inspections"
Frankly, accusations that the scare-quoted "peace movement" will simply forget Iraq if war is averted are a bit rich, considering that a large chunk of what is currently the peace movement was calling attention to the horrific humanitarian situation under the sanctions regime long before Iraq was the war du jour. Large chunks of the peace movement have, frankly, a far more consistent record of opposing disastrous humanitarian situations, and seeking remedies that didn't involve war, long before many of today's hawks suddenly developed an interest (real or feigned) in these issues. I, for one, refuse to be lectured to about the Memory Hole by members of a pro-war movement who appear largely unaware of what's happening in Afghanistan.
THE Americans may have more tanks than us, a lot more troops and more burger bars to feed them, but at least the British contingent has brought its own entertainment to this desert coalition.
Every morning, thousands of US troops are roused from their sleeping bags by two British DJs broadcasting from a makeshift studio in a metal cargo container, parked on the edge of one of the biggest and busiest camps in Kuwait.
While the British Forces Broadcasting Service (BFBS) is willing to rough it in the desert and broadcast with their gas masks to hand, their American counterparts are holed up in a safe, air-conditioned complex thousands of miles from the front line.
Modesty and military protocol prevent the Britons boasting about this in their daily broadcasts to a captive audience of 200,000 troops bedding down in the sand, but their presence has not gone unappreciated. Chris Pratt, the station manager, says: “When we bump into Americans in the queue to dinner or to the toilet, they tell us they listen to us rather their own American Forces Network because they not only prefer the music we play, but they respect the fact we are out here mucking in with them.”
Ask the Americans why they are not here, and a senior officer will mumble something about “force security issues” and change the subject.
Several British entertainers have already been on the telephone offering to put on a concert for the troops. From Hollywood has come a deafening silence.
If the British forces should end up in Baghdad shortly, then Mr Pratt, 47, a former civil servant from Angelsey, and his co-host, Sean Ridley, 35, a former Army officer, won’t be far behind with their record collection.
“We’re not being foolhardy or trying to prove how brave we are. It’s just that British forces out in the field regard us as a way of staying in touch with home,” Mr Pratt said.
Spend half an hour listening to the rival networks and you realise in this coalition there are two armies, living side by side, who barely speak the same language.
While BFBS pours out messages from families, friends and pets, and the football results, the American Forces Network laces all its programmes with a liberal assortment of propaganda and embarrassing tips about personal cleanliness.
In the space of ten minutes yesterday, an American presenter droned on about the need for troops to take time to meditate — “Make your mind your ally” — how not to choke your children by feeding them peanuts and more than you should ever need to be told about washing your “private parts”.
The American output is censored by the generals; the British output is not. Mr Pratt said: “We are civilians, not enlisted like the Yanks, and while we work closely with our military, they don’t give us orders because they trust us to do and say the right thing. We inform but we should also entertain.”
The two men were in Bosnia and Kosovo, and Kuwait before the vast majority of British troops arrived. Their experience is reflected in the expert way that they have decked out their grey container that is both a studio and sleeping accommodation. They even nipped into a local department store to add furnishings and fittings.
While public opinion is as divided as ever in Britain about whether this force should be here at all, the broadcasting community has already lent its support, with Virgin Radio and the BBC running special broadcasts for troops in the Gulf which are relayed through BFBS.
The goodwill messages from home that they have been asked to broadcast have nearly totalled six figures already.
Nicholas Kristof on God. Satan and the Media today takes time out to point out that educated Americans need to reach out to snake-handling, speaking-in-tongues, backwoods morons. Okay, maybe that's stretching the point a bit, but Kristof fails to convince me why I should respect the views of these people:
Evangelicals are increasingly important in every aspect of American culture. Among the best-selling books in America are Tim LaHaye's Christian "left behind" series about the apocalypse; about 50 million copies have been sold. One of America's most prominent television personalities is Benny Hinn, watched in 190 countries, but few of us have heard of him because he is an evangelist.
President Bush has said that he doesn't believe in evolution (he thinks the jury is still out). President Ronald Reagan felt the same way, and such views are typically American. A new Gallup poll shows that 48 percent of Americans believe in creationism, and only 28 percent in evolution (most of the rest aren't sure or lean toward creationism). According to recent Gallup Tuesday briefings, Americans are more than twice as likely to believe in the devil (68 percent) as in evolution.
He then says this:
I tend to disagree with evangelicals on almost everything, and I see no problem with aggressively pointing out the dismal consequences of this increasing religious influence. For example, evangelicals' discomfort with condoms and sex education has led the administration to policies that are likely to lead to more people dying of AIDS at home and abroad, not to mention more pregnancies and abortions.
But liberal critiques sometimes seem not just filled with outrage at evangelical-backed policies, which is fair, but also to have a sneering tone about conservative Christianity itself. Such mockery of religious faith is inexcusable.
Why is it inexcusable to point out the ridiculousness of those who seem hellbent on sending us back to the dark ages, who would let people die because of a misguided belief that sex and pleasure are sinful, who find evolution unbelievable yet unquestionably accept the notion of a unknown, unseen, cosmic producer/director who works in "mysterious ways", and who read crappy endtime pulp fiction written by a hack evangelist, but fear children's books written about a boy wizard? I was brought up to respect other people's religions (although nobody ever explained why...) but that was in a time when religion was a private matter, before evangelicals decided it was their mission to share their devotion to their god whether you wanted to hear it or not. Quite frankly, I don't find the god-smacked to be that interesting.
So sure that's sneering, but how should I approach the willfully ignorant who would dictate social policy? People's lives are at stake while they're playing theological Calvinball.
Kristof then writes:
Robert Fogel of the University of Chicago argues that America is now experiencing a fourth Great Awakening, like the religious revivals that have periodically swept America in the last 300 years
History is full of "Religious Awakenings" and, if I may be so humble to note, millions have died because of someone else's notion of "god" and what "he" wants. Quite simply, that joke's not funny anymore.
More on Kristof
There's a great discussion of Kristof's column over at Atrios, which contains this quote:
"We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart." -- H.L. Mencken
contributed by Tresy.
Then there is this email I received from Matt:
"I was brought up to respect other people's religions (although nobody ever explained why...)"
Here's why: "We have enough religion to hate each other, but not enough to love each other." -- Jonathan Swift
Or, one could argue quite easily, if UBL and his crew had grown up respecting other people's religions, Al Qaeda would not exist.
The problem with Kristof's article is that he jumps from disdain for *evangelicals* to disdain for *Christianity*, in the same way that incautious warbloggers might jump from condemning Wahabbism to condemning Islam.
It's an uncommon lapse in Kristof's usually solid intellectual rigor; perhaps he still has mixed emotions about once dating a girl from a Pentecostal denomination, and isn't quite ready to say that, although she was bright, she was also a follower of a religion that makes no freaking sense.
At any rate, he's wrong, but not entirely so--and I respectfully submit that you are making the same error (failing to distinguish between radical and mainstream) in reverse, if not to quite the same degree.
Very good points.
One serious flaw, pointed out by many over at Atrios, is that Kristof fails to differentiate between "evangelicals" and "fundamentalists". This is a nuance I failed to account for. I'm sure someone's god will forgive me.
The best thing about reading books is you get to see the principal kiss the pig.
At least that's what Cambridge second-grader Zemam Beyene thought yesterday after she watched Tobin Elementary School Principal Donald Watson kiss Daisy, a pot-bellied pig, to honor a bet won by his students after they read more than 2,003 books in a year.
Yesterday was the National Education Association's Read-Across-America Day, and it culminated the reading challenge accepted by the 410 students (kindergarten through eighth grade) at the Tobin School.
By reading or having books read to them, the children were exposed to countless new ideas and new parts of the world. And after all that new exposure, what stood out above all else for Zemam?
``That we got to see Mr. Watson kiss the pig,'' she replied without hesitation.
Daisy, a black 8-year-old pig, rested comfortably in a modified baby carriage on the stage in the school auditorium while Paul Minor of Bristol, Conn., described the cushy life the pig has on his farm.
Daisy and ``Farmer Minor,'' as he calls himself, travel throughout the country to promote reading among schoolchildren.
Along the way, Minor said, he and Daisy have visited the U.S. Capitol (``They told us Daisy was the first four-legged pig to ever visit'') and received a thank-you letter from first lady Laura Bush.
Minor also played a tape recording of the various sounds Daisy makes when she is just waking up or is eating.
``If you don't want to sound like Daisy when you're eating, chew with your mouth closed,'' Minor advised.
The warhead of a long-range missile test-fired by North Korea was found in the U.S. state of Alaska, a report to the National Assembly revealed yesterday.
``According to a U.S. document, the last piece of a missile warhead fired by North Korea was found in Alaska,’’ former Japanese foreign minister Taro Nakayama was quoted as saying in the report. ``Washington, as well as Tokyo, has so far underrated Pyongyang’s missile capabilities.’’
The report was the culmination of monthlong activities of the Assembly’s overseas delegation to five countries over the North Korean nuclear crisis. The Assembly dispatched groups of lawmakers to the United States, Japan, China, Russia and European Union last month to collect information and opinions on the international issue.
The team sent to Japan, headed by Rep. Kim Hak-won of the United Liberal Democrats, reported, ``Nakayama said Washington has come to put more emphasis on trilateral cooperation between South Korea, Japan and the United States since it recognized that the three countries are within the range of North Korean missiles.’’
According to the group dispatched to the U.S., American politicians had a wide range of opinions over the resolution of the nuclear issue, from ``a peaceful resolution’’ to ``military response.’’
Doves, such as Rep. Edward J. Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat and co-chairman of the Bipartisan Task Force on Nonproliferation, called for a peaceful settlement of the current confrontation, by offering food, energy and other humanitarian aid to the poverty-stricken country, while urging the North to give up its nuclear ambitions.
Rep. Markey also said the North should return to the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and the U.S. should make a nonaggression pact with the communist North.
Hardliners, however, warned that the North’s possession of nuclear weapons will instigate a nuclear race in the region, provoking Japan to also acquire nuclear weapons. Rep. Mark Steven Kirk, an Illinois Republican, said the U.S. might have to bomb the Yongbyon nuclear complex should the North try to export its nuclear material to other countries.
Over the controversy concerning the withdrawal of U.S. forces stationed here, most American legislators that the parliamentary delegation met said U.S. troops should stay on the peninsula as long as the Korean people want, the report said.
There are shrill cries of success and sighs of relief surrounding a news report that is being hailed as the biggest catch so far: No.3 man, Sheikh Khalid Muhammad, of the dreaded Al Qaida is captured, alive! The biggest success in the global war against terrorism. This is certainly excellent news and both the Pakistani and the American authorities deserve congratulations.
Unfortunately, while the coalition is claiming success, there is a run for taking the credit. The American version of the news from likes of CNN, Foxnews, MSNBC hardly mentions the Pakistani role and makes it sound like Sheikh Khalid Muhammad was captured somewhere in Texas, not from Rawalpindi. The Pakistani version earlier claimed this to be a joint operation but now it is claimed to be 100% Pakistani operation (News Link Mar 3, 2003).
The contradictions do not stop here. Americans claim that Sheikh Khalid Muhammad is in their custody and is now being interrogated for the second day. Whereas, the Pakistanis are saying that he has not been extradited to any country. Furthermre, it is being said that Sheikh Khalid will be extradited to Kuwait.
Now why Kuwait one asks? Sheikh Khalid Muhammad is being referred to as a citizen of anywhere from Kuwait, Pakistan, Yemen, up to holding 20 passports of different countries. What is his real nationality?
A more troubling problem is that it was reported by both American and Pakistani authorities back in September 2002 that Sheikh Khalid Muhammad was killed in a raid. The reason we remember him vividly was the way his death was dramatized. He was reported as writing words on a wall with his own blood as he was dying ( News Link Sept 15, 2002).
It was reported a few days after the report of a raid that Khalid's wife and children were in custody and being interrogated. ( News Link Sept 20, 2002)
LONDON (Reuters) - An English essay written by a teenager in text messaging short-hand has reignited concern among teachers that literacy standards are under threat.
The Daily Telegraph newspaper reported on Monday that the 13-year-old's teacher could not decipher what the youngster had written.
"I could not believe what I was seeing. The page was riddled with hieroglyphics, many of which I simply could not translate," the teacher told the newspaper.
The teenager's essay which caused the problem began:
"My smmr hols wr CWOT. B4, we used 2go2 NY 2C my bro, his GF & thr 3 :- kids FTF. ILNY, it's a gr8 plc."
In translation:
"My summer holidays were a complete waste of time. Before, we used to go to New York to see my brother, his girlfriend and their three screaming kids face to face. I love New York. It's a great place."
Judith Gillespie, of the Scottish Parent Teacher Council, told the newspaper a decline in grammar and written English was partly linked to the text messaging craze.
"Pupils think orally and write phonetically," she said.
A reporter sent an email to a bunch of her friends about the World Economic Summit. She foolishly forget to tell them to keep it secret. Some startling revelations on what the world's rich and movers and shakers are thinking. She is very angry at finding these comments on the internet. Excerpts below:
The global economy is in very very very very bad shape. Last year when WEF met here in New York all I heard was, "Yeah, it's bad, but recovery is right around the corner". This year "recovery" was a word never uttered. Fear was palpable -- fear of enormous fiscal hysteria. The watchwords were "deflation", "long term stagnation" and "collapse of the dollar". All of this is without war.
- If the U.S. unilaterally goes to war, and it is anything short of a quick surgical strike (lasting less than 30 days), the economists were all predicting extreme economic gloom: falling dollar value, rising spot market oil prices, the Fed pushing interest rates down towards zero with resulting increase in national debt, severe trouble in all countries whose currency is guaranteed agains the dollar (which is just about everybody except the EU), a near cessation of all development and humanitarian programs for poor countries. Very few economists or ministers of finance predicted the world getting out of that economic funk for minimally five-10 years, once the downward spiral ensues.
-Except for diehard American Republicans, a few Brit Tories and some Middle East folks the WEF was in a foul, angry anti-American mood. Last year the WEF was a lovefest for America. This year the mood was so ugly that it reminded me of what it felt like to be an American overseas in the Reagan years. The rich -- whether they are French or Chinese or just about anybody -- are livid about the Iraq crisis primarily because they believe it will sink their financial fortunes.
- US unilateralism is seen as arrogant, bullyish. If the U.S. cannot behave in partnership with its allies -- especially the Europeans -- it risks not only political alliance but BUSINESS, as well.
When Colin Powell gave the speech of his life, trying to win over the nonAmerican delegates, the sharpest attack on his comments came not from Amnesty International or some Islamic representative -- it came from the head of the largest bank in the Netherlands!
I learned from American security and military speakers that, "We need to attack Iraq not to punish it for what it might have, but preemptively, as part of a global war. Iraq is just one piece of a campaign that will last years, taking out states, cleansing the planet."
These WEF folks are freaked out. They see very bad economics ahead, war, and more terrorism. About 10% of the sessions were about terrorism, and it's heavy stuff. One session costed out what another 9/11-type attack would do to global markets, predicting a far, far worse impact due to the "second hit" effect -- a second hit that would prove all the world's post-9/11 security efforts had failed. Another costed out in detail what this, or that, war scenario would do to spot oil prices.
The world isn't run by a clever cabal. It's run by about 5,000 bickering, sometimes charming, usually arrogant, mostly male people who are accustomed to living in either phenomenal wealth, or great personal power. A few have both. Many of them turn out to be remarkably naive -- especially about science and technology. All of them are financially wise, though their ranks have thinned due to unwise tech-stock investing. They pay close heed to politics, though most would be happy if the global political system behaved far more rationally -- better for the bottom line. They work very hard, attending sessions from dawn to nearly midnight, but expect the standards of intelligence and analysis to be the best available in the entire world. They are impatient. They have a hard time reconciling long term issues (global wearming, AIDS pandemic, resource scarcity) with their daily bottomline foci. They are comfortable working across languages, cultures and gender, though white caucasian males still outnumber all other categories. They adore hi-tech gadgets and are glued to their cell phones.
Fifty years to the day from the discovery of the structure of DNA, one of its co-discoverers has caused a storm by suggesting that stupidity is a genetic disease that should be cured.
On 28 February 1953 biologists James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the structure of DNA - the chemical code for all life. The breakthrough revealed how genetic information is passed from one generation to the next and revolutionised biology and medicine.
But in a documentary series to be screened in the UK on Channel 4, Watson says that low intelligence is an inherited disorder and that molecular biologists have a duty to devise gene therapies or screening tests to tackle stupidity.
"If you are really stupid, I would call that a disease," says Watson, now president of the Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory, New York. "The lower 10 per cent who really have difficulty, even in elementary school, what's the cause of it? A lot of people would like to say, 'Well, poverty, things like that.' It probably isn't. So I'd like to get rid of that, to help the lower 10 per cent."
Watson, no stranger to controversy, also suggests that genes influencing beauty could also be engineered. "People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would be great."
Complex traits
But other scientists have questioned both the ethics and plausibility of his suggestions.
Nikolas Rose, a bioethics expert at the London School of Economics, says such genetic engineering may not be possible: "These are complex traits, with multiple genes interacting with the environment."
"These are characteristically casual and provocative statements by James Watson," Rose adds. "I think they should be treated just as amusing rather than as a serious account of what behavioural genetics or any genetics should be doing, or will be able to do."
Geneticist Steve Jones, at University College London, dismisses Watson's comments about beauty as "daft". "The concept of beauty is a subjective one," he told New Scientist.
No fool
But he adds: "The IQ suggestion is a little bit less silly, if you turn the logic on its head. Watson likes to annoy - no question - but he's no fool." Genetics could and does help people with severe disorders like Fragile X syndrome and phenylketonuria, both of which affect IQ, says Jones: "The problem is where do we draw the line?"
Series producer David Dugan, of Windfall Films, said the programmes also show Watson visiting a family who greatly value their child with Down's syndrome, as well as their child without Down's.
"We were keen to confront Jim with this - he was genuinely moved," but insisted that geneticists should work to eliminate the disorder. Dugan believes Watson's views emanate from his own family's experiences with his son, who has a mental illness resembling schizophrenia.
A website keeping a running tally of civilian deaths in the Iraq war is attracting a lot of traffic, and appears to be emerging as an authoritative source of information on the gruesome subject.
T0 see why "Chicago" became the movie of the year in a year when America sleepwalked into war, you do not have to believe it is the best picture of 2002 (mine would be Almodóvar's "Talk to Her"). Nor must you believe that musical comedy is making a comeback in Hollywood (it's barely holding its own on Broadway, where even "Hairspray" has empty seats). All you have to do is watch a single scene.
Christy Smith (left) is not using sign language on “Survivor,” which troubles some in the deaf community.
Last summer, Tanya Bershadsky, a Web designer in her 20s who has worked in the up-and- down tech industry since the mid-1990s, was laid off from a big-name dot-com that unsurprisingly went belly up. Like a couple million others in her situation, Bershadsky quickly started looking for a new job and, like everyone else, her search didn't go very well.
You can't make 
The new Russian duo TATU, formed by two teenage Russian lesbians, Lena Katina and Julia Volkova, has taken the music
wo weeks ago, a group of senior intelligence officials in the Defense Department sat for an hour listening to a briefing by a writer who claims — I am not making this up — that messages encoded in the Hebrew text of the Old Testament provide clues to the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden. One of the officials told me that they had agreed to meet the writer, Michael Drosnin, author of a Nostradamus-style best seller, without understanding that he was promoting Biblical prophecy. Still, rather than shoo him away, they listened politely as he consumed several man-hours of valuable intelligence-crunching time. Apparently he has given similar briefings to top officials of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency.
Another indication that folks in the Administration have been sniffing too much model glue.