June 2007
Monthly Archive
June 14, 2007
Comedy Central is gearing up for a new show, Lil’ Bush. From The Guardian:
“Lil’ Bush portrays the Bush administration as a gang of children – Lil’ Bush, Lil’ Condi and Lil’ Cheney – running wild in the White House and worldwide.
“Compare Lil’ George speaking about his role in life – “I hate doing what I’m told. I want to be a decider” – with Mr Bush’s: “My job is a job to make decisions. I’m a decision – if the job description were, what do you do, it’s decision maker. And I make a lot of big ones and I make a lot of little ones.”
“Lil’ Bush began life in the autumn as a series of short cartoons made specifically for mobile phones.
“But the first of the made-for-televison episodes was due to reach a much wider audience last night with its debut on Comedy Central, which has about 90 million subscribers. It began with Lil’ George visiting Iraq to hunt for some good news as a Father’s Day present for dad, the first President Bush.
“In the second episode Lil’ Cheney, who bites the heads off chickens and sucks their blood, has an affair with Barbara Bush, with scenes that might be too crude for some tastes.”
“According to Donick Cary, creator of the new cartoon series, the transformation of Mr Bush into a cartoon character proved to be relatively easy: his short, simplistic and often confused statements helped.
“Mr Cary, whose credits include the Simpsons, said: “Somehow, this president that we have lends himself to thinking in a simplistic, cartoony fashion. He’s always been about soundbites, one-word answers, move ahead, act from the gut.”
June 14, 2007
Major kudos to Kelloggs.
Kellog has announced it will phase out advertising its products to children under age 12 unless the foods meet specificnutrition guidelines for calories, sugar, fat and sodium.
Kellogg also announced that it would stop using licensed characters or branded toys to promote foods unless the products meet the nutrition guidelines.
The voluntary changes, which will be put in place over the next year and a half, will apply to about half of the products that Kellogg currently markets to children worldwide, including Froot Loops and Apple Jacks cereals and some varieties of Pop Tarts.
The president and chief executive, David Mackay, said those products would either be reformulated to meet the nutrition guidelines or would no longer be advertised to children.
“It is a big change,” Mr. Mackey said. “Where we can make the changes without negatively impacting the taste of the product, we will.”
June 14, 2007
Last year Leo Docherty was a British soldier serving in Afghanistan. He took part in the tough fighting to winkle the Taliban out of the village of Sangin in Helmand province. The following is an excerpt from a piece Docherty wrote for The Guardian:
“…During our advance an 11-year-old boy was killed in the crossfire, shot in the head accidentally by our allies, the Afghan national army. Despite this we established our base in a local government building, the district centre, and patrolled the bazaar every day. We bought mangos and chatted to the locals – who seemed ambivalent about our presence.
“Just below the surface, however, tension simmered. The boy’s death made us a threat to the local population. Despite promising development we had nothing to show for all our big talk. Crucially we had no real answers to questions about the future of the all-important poppy, the basis of Sangin’s economy. To the locals, we were clumsy, interfering foreigners, whose arrival presaged conflict and the destruction of their livelihood. Days later Sangin exploded into violence, seeing some of the fiercest fighting by British troops since the Korean war, and which continues as I write.
“Sadly, many more civilians across Afghanistan have met the same end as the 11-year-old. Recently in Sangin an estimated 21 civilians were killed by bombs dropped from Nato planes after US and British soldiers were ambushed. In the eastern city of Jalalabad in March, US soldiers shot dead 19 civilians in the aftermath of a bomb attack. And yesterday seven policemen were killed by “friendly fire” in an air strike in the eastern province of Nangarhar.
“Often outnumbered and outgunned by militia men, the immediate response of Nato troops is to call on overwhelming firepower delivered by artillery, helicopter gunships and jets. The troops aren’t wicked, they’re just keen on staying alive. But these weapons are blunt-edged and indiscriminate. The price of overwhelming firepower is the death of nearby civilians.
“But accidental or not, civilian deaths catastrophically undermine the entire Nato effort, as relatives of the dead, bent on vengeance, flock to the Taliban cause. As Pashtuns, the inhabitants of Helmand hold Badal, the pursuit of revenge, as a central concept of their social code, which is devotedly adhered to. “A Pashtun waited a hundred years for revenge,” a local saying goes, “and was pleased with such quick work.” Indeed, the Taliban are ruthlessly exploiting this mindset by deliberately engaging Nato troops from villages.
“Afghans are sick of foreign armies killing their people. Their president, Hamid Karzai, has publicly criticised Nato’s methods and warned that “bad consequences” will follow if civilian deaths continue unchecked. The Afghan parliament has called for a halt to Nato military offensives, and for negotiations with Afghan members of the Taliban. In Kabul last month, I met displaced civilians from Helmand province, some of the 80,000 to 115,000 people the UN estimates have lost their homes in the fighting in southern Afghanistan. “Why do British planes kill our people?” they said. I struggled to answer.
“The British command in Helmand should heed the president’s warning. The Taliban now control 50% of Helmand province. Development is happening nowhere, and opium production has reached record levels. Unless we immediately de-escalate the level of violence and prevent further civilian deaths, all of Helmand will be lost.
“In Sangin today the district centre is a battle-scarred fortified position where more than a dozen British troops have been killed fighting from trenches. Soldiers no longer sit on the roof to enjoy the view. The town lies in ruins, with little trace left of the once thriving bazaar. A peaceful, developed Helmand cannot be won by the sword, and the longer we try, the greater the tragedy.”
June 13, 2007
No matter how badly and persistently exposed and discredited they become, the stalwarts of the global warming denial industry just keep at it. Give them a moment of your time and you’ll be overwhelmed with information, some of it distorted and a lot of it deliberately made up. The worst part is that a lot of this nonsense gets distributed and thereby effectively validated by the right-wing media.
What to do? If you want the other side of the story, truth instead of fiction, go to
http://www.realclimate.org/ the site that bills itself as “Climate Science from Climate Scientists.” Some of the articles are, admittedly, directed to scientists but they make an effort to include a lot of information that is digestible by lay people like me.
They also post a convenient index of sources you can reference, sorted by the reader’s existing knowledge of global warming science.
There’s going to be a lot of debate in Canada over global warming and what to do about it. The more you know the easier that debate will be to understand.
June 13, 2007
For all the bluster about the great environmental breakthrough at the G8 conference, here’s what they actually agreed to, the actual text:
“We take note of and are concerned about the recent UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports. The most recent report concluded both, that global temperatures are rising, that this is caused largely by human activities and, in addition,that for increases in global average temperature, there are projected to be major changes in ecosystem structure and function with predominantly negative consequences for biodiversity and ecosystems, e.g. water and food supply.
“We are therefore committed to taking strong and early action to tackle climate change in order to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system. Taking into account the scientific knowledge as represented in the recent IPCC reports, global greenhouse gas emissions must stop rising, followed by substantial global emission reductions. In setting a global goal for emissions reductions in the process we have agreed today involving all major emitters, we will consider seriously the decisions made by the European Union, Canada and Japan which include at least a halving of global emissions by 2050. We commit to achieving these goals and invite the major emerging economies to join us in this endeavour.”
If that sounds less than inspiring – well it is. It’s going to take something with a lot more substance than this drivel before we’re going to see any genuinely meaningful global action.
June 13, 2007
The 2006 AttackThe big news out of Iraq today is the bombing of the Shiite Samarra shrine, the Al-Askariya Mosque. A similar bombing at the mosque in 2006 sparked the current wave of sectarian violence. Today’s bombing took out two minarets.
At first it was thought to be just an al-Qaeda effort to fan the flames. Now it seems it may have been an inside job in which Iraqi security forces colluded with al-Qaeda saboteurs
U.S. Maj. Gen. Benjamin Mixon, told CNN he believes members of the Iraqi security forces who were guarding the site either assisted or directly took part in helping al Qaeda insurgents place and detonate explosives at the mosque’s minarets.
Mixon said there was no evidence at all that this was an attack using mortars or anything of the like and said that this was an inside job. 15 members of the Iraqi security force at the mosque have been arrested.
June 13, 2007
NATO defence ministers will get together tomorrow to review the alliance’s mission in Afghanistan. One topic for discussion will be civilian casualties or “collateral damage” as they call it. At this late stage (better late than never) they want to review procedures to find ways to reduce the deaths of civilians that threaten to undermine the NATO mission and the Karzai government.
Here’s a prediction. The one thing that won’t cross their lips is the only solution – stop using artillery and air strikes to make up for a gross shortage of troops on the ground. Waging war on the cheap inevitably results in unnecessary civilian deaths.
Did you ever notice that when we have these airstrike catastrophes, it’s almost always when our troops are on the defensive. We send them out on patrols. They get ambushed. To save their own skins our troops have to call in air support. Civilians get whacked – by mistake of course.
We get ambushed because the bad guys control the territory, not us. If we controlled the territory they wouldn’t have the freedom of movement to set up ambushes at their leisure and to take our troops by surprise when and where they like. No, we claim that we control this territory but they’re the side setting up the ambushes.
We don’t control the territory because our forces are grossly understrength. The NATO ministers know that and so do their generals. But they’d rather drive stakes through their hearts than admit it. Admitting it would mean that we have our soldiers over there giving their lives to buy time for a failing and corrupt government that continues to lose popular support. That’s a candle that’s burning at both ends.
The irony is that the problem is a woeful shortage of troops but the answer isn’t more troops. The answer lies across the border as the following item explains.
June 13, 2007
The preceding item deals with NATO’s conundrum on how to stop killing so many Afghan civilians in the war with the Taliban. However we also need to accept that we’re not going to defeat the Taliban militarily and that this war will drag on, if the Karzai government can survive, until there are some fundamental changes involving Afghanistan, Pakistan and India.
Malcolm Rifkind, former British foreign secretary and secretary of state for defence, laid it all out recently in The Independent:
“…when under pressure the Taliban, and their al-Qa’ida colleagues, retreat to the wild frontier area on the borders between Pakistan and Afghanistan. In these regions, nominally part of Pakistan, the writ of Islamabad does not run, and the rebels can find respite, reorganise, train and recruit.
“… it is widely known that elements within Pakistan, particularly in the army and the intelligence service, are either helping the Taliban or, at least, are turning a blind eye to them.
“…the United States and Britain are at fault for not fully understanding why the Pakistanis are reluctant to dismantle the Taliban. It is not because of any sympathy for terrorism or admiration of al-Qa’ida, a distinct organisation from the Taliban. It is because of longstanding Pakistani national interests that have been largely ignored by the West.
“The first point to realise is that the frontier between Pakistan and Afghanistan has never been recognised by successive Afghan governments, and remains a bone of contention. Given that the Pashtun and Baluchi people straddle the border, this has alarming implications for Islamabad.
“The Pashtuns are the leading tribal grouping in Afghanistan and there have been several insurgencies by the Baluchis in Pakistan’s southernmost province. The issue is, however, even more complicated, linked as it is to the dispute between Pakistan and India over Kashmir, and to wider India-Pakistan relations.
“During the Cold War, the Afghan monarchy allied itself with the Soviet Union and India in an attempt to obtain weapons to use against the Pakistanis, who were, in turn, supplied by the United States. The Indians, for their part, were happy to see a Pakistan weakened and distracted by frontier problems on their western border.
“Against this background, the Pakistanis, who have always been sensitive about the integrity of their state, welcomed the Taliban as they were religious fundamentalists, not Pashtun nationalists, and therefore had no claim on Pakistani territory.
“The five years of Taliban rule in Kabul were the only exception to 60 years of poor Afghan-Pakistani relations since 1948. Barnett Rubin, a regional analyst, has remarked that from a Pakistani perspective Taliban rule is very acceptable: ‘An unstable Afghanistan is the second-best option to a stable one ruled by your friends.’
“If the United States and Britain want more wholehearted co-operation from Pakistan they need to work with the grain of Pakistani self-interest. This could be achieved in three ways. First, Mr Karzai and his government must be pressed to recognise the current frontier with Pakistan, known as the Durand Line. Second, India should be encouraged to reduce its presence in Afghanistan. It has opened two consulates in Kandahar and Jalalabad. The Pakistanis fear that these are being used as bases from which to foment mischief. Third, Musharraf must be encouraged to introduce more normal politics into Waziristan and the frontier areas. At present, political parties are banned, giving Islamic jihadists and their allies a free run at winning local hearts and minds.
“Winning in Afghanistan means defeating the Taliban and al-Qa’ida in Helmand. It means winning the support of the Afghan people through social reform and economic growth. But all that effort may be wasted if the frontier region of Pakistan remains a safe haven.”
If you’ve read this far you may have the sinking feeling that we’ve misplayed our hand in Afghanistan for the last six years. That leaves us having to decide whether we just write that off and start again or accept our defeat and try to work out some deal between Kabul and the Taliban – just like the Kabul government wants.
June 13, 2007
The creepiest veep in American history is at it again. The Dick really, really wants to whack Iran before the villagers arrive at the White House with their pitchforks and torches to drive out the monsters. As he did with Iraq six years earlier he’s trying to launch his next war on a bed of carefully crafted deception.
The Inter Press Service reports that, this time however, the military isn’t rolling over:
“The allegation that Iran has reversed a decade-long policy and is now supporting the Taliban, conveyed in a series of press articles quoting “senior officials” in recent weeks, is related to a broader effort by officials aligned with Vice President Dick Cheney to portray Iran as supporting Sunni insurgents, including al Qaeda, to defeat the United States in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
“An article in the Guardian published May 22 quoted an anonymous U.S. official as predicting an “Iranian-orchestrated summer offensive in Iraq, linking al Qaeda and Sunni insurgents to Tehran’s Shia militia allies” and as referring to the alleged “Iran-al Qaeda linkup” as “very sinister”.
“That article and subsequent reports on CNN May 30, in the Washington Post Jun. 3 and on ABC news Jun. 6 all included an assertion by an unnamed U.S. official or a “senior coalition official” that Iran is following a deliberate policy of supplying the Taliban’s campaign against U.S., British and other NATO forces.
“Both Gates and McNeill denied flatly last week that there is any evidence linking Iranian authorities to those arms. Gates told a press conference on Jun. 4, “We do not have any information about whether the government of Iran is supporting this, is behind it, or whether it’s smuggling, or exactly what is behind it.” Gates said that “some” of the arms in question might be going to Afghan drug smugglers.
“The commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, Gen. McNeill, implied that the arms trafficking from Iran is being carried out by private interests. “[W]hen you say weapons being provided by Iran, that would suggest there is some more formal entity involved in getting these weapons here,” he told Jim Loney of Reuters June 5. “That’s not my view at all.'”
Dick by name, Dick by nature. Cheney already has manipulated his country into a draining, unwinnable war that it cannot even escape. Rather than working to resolve that fiasco, he’d rather get the US in yet another megawar. After all, Halliburton makes out like a bandit, win or lose, and these days the business of war is one of the most profitable businesses to be found.
June 13, 2007
Tony Blair says Afghanistan could become a hotbed of anti-Western violence, another Iraq. Well, Tony – duh.
In the now standard Tony Blair on-the-way-out performance, The British PM marked the beginning of his second-last week in power by trying to fudge any responsibility for fueling Islamist extremism in Iraq:
“The mistake was not understanding the fundamentally rooted nature of this global movement that we face and that actually in a situation – whether Iraq or Afghanistan – where you are trying to bring about a different form of government, these people will try to stop us,” he said after a speech on media at Reuters headquarters in London.
Blair might even get away with that nonsense except for the facts that get in his way. The Anglo-American war on Iraq did fuel Islamist extremism but not just in Iraq. It gave al-Qaeda and its affiliated groups a hell of a boost everywhere from West Africa to Europe to Asia. Let’s make it perfectly plain – George w. Bush and his lapdog, Tony Blair, personally became al-Qaeda’s top recruiting officers. Shrub, in particular, also made recruiting much harder for his own military. Mission Accomplished, I guess.
And just how are things going in Afghanistan? The Harpos and Hillier tell us everything’s going great. What do you think? “We face a serious situation … clearly in the south and east there is a serious and chronic insurgency,” Sherard Cowper-Coles, Britain’s ambassador to Afghanistan, said.
« Previous Page — Next Page »
The Mound of Sound 