Now, of course, we all know Putin shoots tigers and, by night, fights petty crime in Moscow to make the streets safe for larger crime; so there's little chance Dubya would have anything on him in an armwrestling contest. But now we get word that there's a feeling in certain circles that, maybe, just maybe, one of Medvedev's balls might've dropped?
Really, what are the odds of a surprise run by Medvedev when his term is up and he's expected to just pat the seat for Ol' Vlad like, "Was just keeping warm for you, Tsarov"? How fun would that be? How quickly would he get poisoned?
...is the Midwest coming under the sway of Canada. Really? Seriously? Kansas? Kansas under the sway of pot-decriminalizing, bilingual, socialized healthcare-having Canada? Madness. In Soviet Russia, prediction cracks up you!
Must've been a slow news day at the Journal. This hit reddit about a month ago and enjoyed a day of BOLD RED ALL-CAPS on Drudge around the same time. But, seriously... Kansas? Wow. And South Carolina under the sway of the European Union? Come now, anybody who's crossed the Mason Dixon knows SC is just biding its time until nobody's looking and then-BAM!-secession.
But, really, this predicting thing is fun. Let's try, eh? I predict that, in the next few years the continued slump in demand will push Putin threaten to cut off assistance to Iran's Bushehr facility if they don't do somethin' crazy. The resulting international backlash when he's found out will provide the perfect opening for Medvedev to demonstrate that he does, indeed, have a sack. Medvedev puts Putin on trial and he's exiled to the United States where he and Dubya do armwrestling for charity in Vegas.
DR: PANARIN: Insolent Amerikanskii; your decadent empire crumbles as we are speaking! TRANSLATOR: "Mr. Panarin posits, in brief, that mass immigration, economic decline, and moral degradation will trigger a civil war next fall and the collapse of the dollar. Around the end of June 2010, or early July, he says, the U.S. will break into six pieces -- with Alaska reverting to Russian control." -- WSJ
I have no idea where to begin, so let's start here.
I'll try to keep this brief because it is a matter of no consequence, but Stanley Fish's piece on AT&T, "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love my Voice Mail," or whatever, wherein he tells us of trying to change his service via telephone, having a mild stroke over corporate language, and taking his revenge by writing a column (well play'd, sirra), so, see, we all fold back on ourselves with contented pop-pomo "glee" and "satisfaction," is a major thorn in my ass.
My problems are various. First, Dr. Fish asks us to forgive him in advance for having two homes and the problems that come with them. Imagine for a second if John McCain had done that. How well do you think the populace would have taken, "Look, folks. It's hard to deal with five mansions and two condos, but I can handle that challenge," etc.? Questions of class cannot be "bracketed," and the context of our Story of Frustration Rewarded, Fish's Pilgrim's Progress through the teleworld, determines our understanding. We can't forget about who Stanley Fish is and then react to his "ordeal" from behind the veil of ignorance.
How many times can I say the same thing? One more: if Fish had written a story about how he had returned to Home #2 after a long time to find it occupied by stoats and weasels, perhaps our sympathy readings would have ticked up. It's a bitch to get weasels out of your mansion, even if you do have three stout friends with cudgels. (What I'm doing here is a little text-blend on Mr. Fish, you see, so that he, with his animal name, joins Mr. Toad, Badger, Ratty and Moley in The Wind in the Willows, which, full disclosure, was my favorite thing to listen to when I was small. Cross-disciplinarity, self-referentiality, intertextual references and light caricature, let us remember, are all hallmarks of the bargain basement postmodernism seminar that Fish runs.)
Point: the quality of the pain experienced has a lot to do with whether the reader will allow Fish to bracket his class issues. Also, bracketing anticipates a return to the bracketed matter. Our sympathy for Fish presumably escalates when he publishes his piece on Class and the Telephone. Hint.
All other problems with the piece flow from this first bracketing. Stanley is not a person who gets the bureaucratic run-around so often as to be inured to it, so AT&T makes him crazy with a Network kind of amokness. People who spend their days-off standing in line at the gas company, then at Department of Human Services, constantly being unserved, approach bureaucracy with frustration, not satisfaction, as the expected end product. Thus, what Stanley brackets away is an understanding of why he has such a hard time with AT&T: he has irrational expectations of service. Note the arrogance of his demanding that AT&T be running fully staffed on Sunday. Okay, noted? Let's move on.
Again, from his cocoon, Stanley can't tell that the grammatical boner that sends him into apoplexy might actually be intentional. Operators cut in and out of multiple phone calls rapidly. Sometimes they'll lose the first syllables, sometimes the last. "With whom do I have the pleasure of speaking with?" could lose its front or back, and remain nominally intelligible and polite. The greeting has the advantage, from a corporate viewpoint, of inducing hypnosis, or from a consumer's advocate's viewpoint, of assuaging concern. (Also, I've gone seven rounds with Ma Bell, and seventeen with Verizon, and never have I heard this Yeti-phrase. Is it possible, not to be meta-anything, that Stan has made this story up as bait? Is he just stirring up the pond?)
Other things Stanley loses with his class in brackets: the realization that the operator who laughs is laughing at him, not with; the understanding that AT&T has no idea who he is, or what conference Florida International plays football in; the sure knowledge that the troubles of one little person, etc.; the possibility that there are other things outside his immediate experience worth writing about, as Israel continues to bomb Gaza, and possibly even there are some experiences near to his own worth writing about, like winter, or Christmas, because who clears up bureaucratic slop between Christmas and New Year's?
But the kicker is this: Fish, by excluding his story from solidarity with a community, clearly even while he is enacting it, forgets the double bind he's put the customer service people into. Refer the crazy man to your boss, and you seriously could be fired. Deny good customer service to the crazy man, e.g. by refusing to refer him up the chain of command, and you could also be fired.
Operators hem and haw, not because they're corporate peons (which assessment is the unspoken message of Fish's diatribe, that people lose their humanity by internalizing corporate imperatives or some such bull's shit) but because they're in an untenable position.
Seriously, a Christmas message for everybody, you, me, Fish, Israel, Hamas: try a little tenderness...
As if the end of capitalism-as-we-know-it weren't enough to bring out the pre-millenial tension, now comes what looks an awful lot like endgame for Gaza.
Opening the routes to commerce was Hamas’s main goal in its cease-fire with Israel, just as ending the rocket fire was Israel’s central aim. But while rocket fire did go down drastically in the fall to 15 to 20 a month from hundreds a month, Israel said it would not permit trade to begin again because the rocket fire had not completely stopped and because Hamas continued to smuggle weapons from Egypt through desert tunnels. Hamas said this was a violation of the agreement, a sign of Israel’s real intentions and cause for further rocket fire.
Why now? This is not an off-the-cuff response to an immediate threat, remember. Every police and fire station in Gaza is a target; this isn't a fine-bore assassination. The stated provocation -- Hamas' unwillingness / inability to halt rocket attacks absolutely, despite the recent ratcheting down of same by 90 percent -- is incommensurate to Israel's response. A planned operation; so, timing matters.
Does the Bush-Obama interregnum matter here? Is this attack one last bash in the days of carte blanche? Is this a pre-election surprise? Ehud called off his campaign a la the Air Pirate, after all. (What if McCain had had something to bomb back in October? What if...) Is this, in short, something other than the end times for Palestine?
The possible net gain for Israel is so small (0 rockets a month from 10-20), indeed at this point is negative, as 70-odd rockets were launched in response to the raids, and the risk so ludicrous that the Road Map cycle (raids, talks, breakdowns, raids) is now obsolete.
Egypt has no further incentive to keep Rafah closed. Ditto Syria and a tight leash on Hezbollah. Israel has to imagine that overwhelming force will eliminate the threat from Gazastan, and trump any response from the broader community of militants. Which is not exactly what we saw in Lebanon, but selah.
Then: Israel carpet-bombs Gaza, which experiences Beirut-2006-like casualties, world opens its heart to Hamas. At this point, we either get back on the Road Map, and kids lose their hands for next 20 years playing with cluster bomblets, or the bombing doesn't stop, and our children will talk about Palestinians the way we talk about Tasmanians. -- ds
Little Nouri is consolidating power. Today's NYT story on the arrest of 35 Interior Ministry officials includes a correction.
An earlier version of this article incorrectly reported that one of the Iraqi officials arrested was Gen. Ahmed Abu Raqeef, the ministry’s director of internal affairs.
Turns out WaPo read the first draft and just called up General Abu Raqeef to ask if he had hired a lawyer. Obv., 'Qeef was pissed:
When reached by telephone, Raqeef denied the allegation and said he was still in his job. He blamed disgruntled rivals inside the ministry for spreading rumors to discredit him." I fired many officers and sent some of them to face justice," Raqeef told the Washington Post. "Probably this is why they are trying to destroy my reputation."
Until we have details of the planned coup, names of the conspirators, when they met, where they met, how much money they had, and proof that Al Awda (The Return) is more than an acronym for Nouri's Al Dawa, probably we should file these stories under "Nouri Does the Putin."
GI's are out. Surely it would help Nouri going forward if Shiite militias acting as the military wing of Dawa were active again. And the quickest route to that happening is to diminish the power of the IM's Internal Affairs, chief of which is the "squeaky clean" Gen'l Abu Raqeef. Says Mr. Kazimi at the Hudson Institute:
He was arrested by U.S. troops not too long ago on trumped up charges, and I wouldn't be surprised if these latest accusations turn out to be more of the same.
As we transition from an economy based on speculation to one based on gift, let DS be no exception to the potlatch: a gift for you, dear Reader.
I've spent most of my time the past few weeks working down at the paint shop, whose one advantage over other jobs is the license I've been given to indoctrinate others to my musical beliefs. Ha. What this means is I listen to the first Joggers record a lot. Which is an acquired taste, Pitchfork's 8.0 notwithstanding, featuring as it does the "thing" that skyrocketed the band to fame, namely shape note singing. Check it here, at 02:30 :
...Republicans will start electing non-Anglos. Congratulations, for instance, go to new Representative Anh Johnny Cao, who rid us all of William Jefferson to become the new poster child (sorry Bobby Tomato) for a no-longer-race-exclusive-GOP. Ignore John Boehner's lame writing:
In a release titled “The Future is Cao,” Boehner wrote that “the Cao victory is a symbol of what can be achieved when we think big, present a positive alternative and win the trust of the American people.”
Mr. Cao joins Republican sponsors of terrorism Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Lincoln Diaz-Balart and Mario Diaz-Balart in the exclusive Quagmire Caucus, a group open to right-wing immigrants, refugees or children of same who fled American military action in the 60s and 70s.
I also considered titling this post "How Now Brown Cao?" Forgive me, and chuc may man, Mr. Representative. You may now git some. -- ds
The infrastructure improvements, in ordinary circumstances, would be welcome news in a poor and neglected neighborhood like Silwan. But in the charged atmosphere of East Jerusalem, which Israel seized from the Jordanians in the 1967 war and later annexed, some perceive even municipal road works and new traffic arrangements as part of a larger plan.
Soft pedal? Ignorance? Lack of sleep? What happened here?
Since when have residents of poor neighborhoods anywhere ever seen "infrastructure improvements" as "welcome news"? I mean, I get the jobs argument, but it didn't happen that way in the South Bronx. Or Columbus OH, where I-71 cuts off the East Side from the rest of town, or Richmond VA where I-195 excises basically all the poor neighborhoods from the monied core of the city, or indeed anywhere in America.
"New traffic arrangements"?? Like Jews-only access roads? I mean, what to us are mere "traffic arrangements" are the means of repression in E Jerusalem and the W Bank.
Not to hyperventilate here, but this Robert Moses attitude towards the people on the ground is not doing the State of Israel any favors, either in terms of pure PR or more seriously, in terms of preserving peace. And all these "construction projects" are handled neutrally in the NYT, as if Palestinian anger over them is utterly incomprehensible.
Man. Flashing fuck fingers at the NYT today, y'all... -- ds
...and I won't blow myself up in this public place?
Hamas gained popular support in a context of official fecklessness. The equation is not simply, provide general welfare = win elections. Hamas won the Palestinian assembly because it gave people, over the course of decades, the material wealth that Fatah hoarded for itself, the Arafat family, and sundry cronies.
Point is, it doesn't matter how much American civilian aid / reconstruction gets doled out. If we are still bombing civilian targets on flawed intelligence, if we are still occupying territory, we are the enemy.
I mean, never mind the fact that there is not such thing as unfettered distribution of reconstruction aid: we and the Iraqi government have some problems building those precious water treatment plants.
Pakistan under Musharraf, and I'm guessing this won't change under Zardari, said thanks but no thanks to that reconstruction aid, adding, "Could we please have some of those F-16s though? We need a rapid-response delivery vehicle for our nuclear weapons, you see."
Reconstruction aid is a bridge to nowhere. Only a legitimately elected regional government will be able to deal with the NW Frontier. Our best bet in the meantime is targeted assassinations of Qaeda and Taliban leaders. Preferably not from airplanes/drones. If that would be made easier by breaking Pakistan into little bits (a Baluch republic in the southwest, bantustans around the Khyber) so be it. Eff with the bull, you get the horns. -- ds
Doug Burgess in the NYT has editorialized in support of prosecuting Somali pirates under terrorism laws, arguing, among other things, that pirates are hostis humani generis, enemies of the human race.
Now the last time the paper called someone hostis humani generis, it was Saddam Hussein, but you know, we'll let bye-byes be bye-byes. It was a long story, there were subpoenas, and it involved poor Judith Miller having "lunch" with -eugh- Karl Rove.
What's not to love about Somali pirates? First of all, it takes balls of brass to hit the Indian Ocean in a skiff and knock off a luxury liner or an oil tanker. There is no count of the men who have died in these pirate raids, just by virtue of foul weather.
Second, they're getting money into the hands of the Somali populace, which is something no "legitimate institution" in Somalia has succeeded in doing, from the warlords' gangs to the UN-pawn transitional government, to the Islamic Courts Union.
Third, it's not like these men have much choice in the matter. Stay on land, and you might be able to smuggle khat for a living. Oh. Or not. Of course, there's a civil war going on, and if the Ethiopian occupiers (for whom we the US provided air cover) don't mistake you for an insurgent, chances are some yank from JTF-Horn will.
Fourth, compared to the grim specter of Germany suddenly finding it necessary to vest the powers of a unitary executive in the chancellor again, the pirates look like Goldilockses.
Fifth, what kind of neoliberal worth his salt would do anything but applaud the ingenuity of these men, their ability to take lemons and make cash out of 'em. Piracy is one response to the West's relentless hectoring of the third world to do what their parents did and get a job sir. It's a small business, run in a decentralized manner. CEOs are reinvesting their capital in operations to increase productivity, you know, instead of investing it in corporate jets. Having had early success, they've broadened their scope.
And the real kicker? Shippers' insurers realize what this dillweed in the NYT chooses to ignore: it's cheaper to pay these men than to mount operations to "rescue" the impounded merchandise. Shippers themselves would rather pay pirates their ransom than pay insurance companies the ludicrously high premiums that would attend any decision by the shippers to do something rash such as arm all crew. Filling a market niche cheaply! Reinvestment and expansion! What part of piracy is not model capitalism?
Since this Doug person needs to be taken back to middle-school civics class, we'll start here: Piracy is fundamentally apolitical -- there is no pirates' polis. This is how it differs from terrorism. Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh were pirates. Pirates helped the colonies throw off the British yoke. You can't pay Al Qaeda to cease operations, to release the whereabouts of Osama Bin Laden etc. Any pirate, however, can be paid cash. All grievances can be settled for legal tender.
"Gimme the Loot" is running through my head. -- ds
Leaving aside the question of whether there ever really was an "American World" to predicate a "Post-American World," Fukuyama's generally on that "man, we gotta make our society actually work 'cause other folks is catchin' up"-boilerplate steez that's pretty de rigeur nowadays, what with our society not really working and other folks catchin' up as they is. Very little new or interesting--which isn't necessarily too huge a criticism, as the problems faced are well known, as are many reasonable solution--but here was an interesting tidbit: The critique was that real men and real foreign policy professionals don’t do this kind of nation building or deploy soft power, but rather deal with hard power with military force.
But, in fact, American foreign policy has to be preoccupied with a certain kind of social work today. Opponents of American power around the world—the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran, as well as populist leaders in Latin America like Hugo Chavez, Rafael Correa or Evo Morales—have succeeded in coming to power because they can offer social services directly to poor people in their countries.
Here's where one of the real shames of the transition. BHO pledged to double foreign aid to $50 billion. In recent weeks, he's said that may have to be one of the things on the chopping block in light of the financial Gotterdammerung. Crying shame, that, 'cause wouldn't it be interesting if'n we could stroll into Pakistan with maybe 2/3 the current military aid, putting the other third into building them... say... water purification systems?
