July 2007
Monthly Archive
July 22, 2007
China is deluged by rainstorms and floods. So are parts of Britain. What could be worse? Maybe it would be to be in sunny Greece, Italy or Southern France. Europe’s Mediterranean nations are facing the unthinkable – weather so hot it kills their tourism industry.
In Greece, temperatures have reached 43 C. in the shade, the hottest weather in over a century.
‘The Mediterranean climate of this country no longer exists. It is changing, perhaps even faster than we expected,’ said Michalis Petrakis, director of Greece’s Institute of Environmental Research at the National Observatory in Athens.
It’s the same story throughout most of the eastern Med. Forest fires are spreading throughout the region, wildlife is simply dying off.
July 21, 2007
July 21, 2007
CNN.com has fielded a bizarre defence of reporter Wolf Blitzer. It comes on the heels of the thrashing Blitzer took at the hands of Michael Moore a few days ago. Moore had been invited on to talk about his latest documentary “Sicko.” Blitzer preceded the Moore interview with a piece by CNN’s medical reporter, Sanjay Gupta, that challenged Moore’s credibility. When Moore got his turn, he shredded Blitzer who stood before the camera almost mute and looking stunned.
We all have our own opinions but I’ve always thought Blitzer to be a journalistic lightweight, constantly testing the winds of opinion and sniping from the sidelines. Given the rousing defence of their reporter, CNN must think a lot of others share my opinion:
Wolf Blitzer’s in the news again. CNN’s colorful, attack-dog journalist was involved in another on-air confrontation, this time with “Sicko” filmmaker Michael Moore.
“Attack dog journalist”? Oh, spare me.
Liberals have learned what conservatives have long known — that there are benefits to being seen as “standing up” to the “hostile” press. Former President Clinton’s testy exchange with Chris Wallace on Fox News Channel last September was particularly instructive. Fans of Democratic presidential candidates are delighted about their refusal to appear in a debate sponsored by Fox.
“I’m much more sensitive to it because I suspect that politicians and people who have political agendas are going to use these forums increasingly not just to answer questions on substantive issues, but to try to score some points and rally their bases,” Blitzer said.
[Blitzer] sees himself as a surrogate for the public, with a responsibility to ask newsmakers about things that their critics are saying about them. If a question is ducked, he’ll ask again. If it’s ducked again, he’ll point that out and move on.
What a self-serving load of crap! Thanks CNN.
July 21, 2007
Spiegel Online reports that French authorities have confirmed what a lot of people have long believed, you don’t actually need a brain to work in a tax office.
The proof lies in the case of a French civil servant. When he went to doctors complaining of a mild numbness in his left leg, they x-rayed his skull. Inside, where the brain ought to have been, they found a huge, fluid-filled cavity.
Tests showed that the man’s IQ is 75 — the average is 100 — but he was not considered physically or mentally disabled. Dr. Lionel Fuillet said that his condition had not impared his development or his socialization. He is married with two children and works in the tax office.
July 21, 2007
A secret memorandum leaked to Britain’s Daily Telegraph indicates that the demands of the ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have so sapped British military strength as to undermine the ability of the military to defend Britain itself.
Gen Sir Richard Dannatt has told senior commanders that reinforcements for emergencies or for operations in Iraq or Afghanistan are “now almost non-existent”.
In the memorandum to fellow defence leaders, the Chief of the General Staff (CGS) confessed that “we now have almost no capability to react to the unexpected”. The “undermanned” Army now has all its units committed to either training for war in Iraq and Afghanistan, on leave or on operations.
“General Dannatt’s appraisal means that we are unable to intervene if there is an emergency in Britain or elsewhere, that’s self-evident,” a senior officer said.
“But this is a direct result of the decision to go into Afghanistan on the assumption that Iraq would diminish simultaneously. We are now reaping the reward of that assumption.”
July 21, 2007
Former US Marine corporal Trent Thomas has been handed a bad conduct discharge and sent on his way after being convicted of kidnapping and conspiracy to commit murder in the execution of an unarmed Iraqi last year.
Thomas and his squad dragged the man from his home, marched him 1,000 yards and shot him 11-times. The squad members have claimed they acted out of frustration with the Iraqi legal system.
The former marine displayed no remorse for the killing, saying, “I believe we did what we needed to do to save Marines’ lives.”
July 21, 2007
Well at least they don’t burn’em at the stake. From McClatchey:
Sana Kuma stands charged in Israel with the crime of “practicing magic”, an offence that could net her up to five years in jail. Just what did she do to get on the wrong side of the Israeli criminal justice system? She’s been reading customer’s coffee grounds to divine their futures. To some that would be just harmless fortune-telling. In Israel that’s a serious crime.
“Life is enemies and friends,” Kuma said recently after doing a coffee-ground reading for a former Miss Israel. “I have to accept the good and the bad.”
Kuma’s transgression is something known to its practitioners as tasseography. Put more simply, it is the ancient art of overturning a coffee cup — usually a demitasse used for Turkish coffee — and looking for answers in the patterns left behind by the grounds.
July 21, 2007
Robert Fisk has written an important piece in today’s Independent in which he points out that T.E. Lawrence had it right about Iraq (and Afghanistan)when he wrote:
‘Rebellions can be made by 2 per cent active and 98 per cent passively sympathetic’
Writing of the Arab resistance to Turkish occupation in the 1914-18 war, he asks of the insurgents (in Iraq and elsewhere): “… suppose they were an influence, a thing invulnerable, intangible, without front or back, drifting about like a gas? Armies were like plants, immobile as a whole, firm-rooted, nourished through long stems to the head. The Arabs might be a vapour…”
How typical of Lawrence to use the horror of gas warfare as a metaphor for insurgency. To control the land they occupied, he continued, the Turks “would have need of a fortified post every four square miles, and a post could not be less than 20 men. The Turks would need 600,000 men to meet the combined ill wills of all the local Arab people. They had 100,000 men available.”
Now who does that remind you of? The “fortified post every four square miles” is the ghostly future echo of George W Bush’s absurd “surge”. The Americans need 600,000 men to meet the combined ill will of the Iraqi people, and they have only 150,000 available. Donald Rumsfeld, the architect of “war lite” is responsible for that. Yet still these rascals get away with it.
Hands up those readers who know that Canada’s Defence Minister, Gordon O’Connor, actually sent a letter to Rumsfeld two days before his departure in disgrace from the Pentagon, praising this disreputable man’s “leadership”. Yes, O’Connor wanted “to take this opportunity to congratulate you on your many achievements (sic) as Secretary of Defence, and to recognise the significant contribution you have made in the fight against terrorism”. The world, gushed the ridiculous O’Connor, had benefited from Rumsfeld’s “leadership in addressing the complex issues in play”.
O’Connor tried to shrug off this grovelling note, acquired through the Canadian Access to Information Act, by claiming he merely wanted to thank Rumsfeld for the use of US medical facilities in Germany to ferry wounded Canadian soldiers home from Afghanistan. But he made no mention of this in his preposterous letter. O’Connor, it seems, is just another of the world’s illusionists who believe they can ignore the facts – and laud fools – by stating the opposite of the truth. Bush, of course, is among the worst of these meretricious creatures. So is the late Tony Blair.
Oh, how we miss Lawrence. “The printing press is the greatest weapon in the armoury of the modern (guerrilla) commander,” he wrote 78 years ago, accurately predicting al-Qa’ida’s modern-day use of the internet. For insurgents, “battles were a mistake … Napoleon had spoken in angry reaction against the excessive finesse of the 18th century, when men almost forgot that war gave licence to murder”.
“Rebellion must have an unassailable base …
In the minds of men converted to its creed. It must have a sophisticated alien enemy, in the form of a disciplined army of occupation too small to fulfil the doctrine of acreage: too few to adjust number to space, in order to dominate the whole area effectively from fortified posts.
“It must have a friendly population, not actively friendly, but sympathetic to the point of not betraying rebel movements to the enemy. Rebellions can be made by 2 per cent active in a striking force, and 98 per cent passively sympathetic … Granted mobility, security … time, and doctrine … victory will rest with the insurgents, for the algebraical factors are in the end decisive, and against them perfections of means and spirit struggle quite in vain.”
I remember how Daniel Pipes – one of the great illusionists of modern American journalism – announced in the summer of 2003 that what the Iraqis needed was (no smirking here, please), a “democratically minded strongman”.
But wait, Pipes is at it again. The director of the “Middle East Forum” has been writing in Canada’s National Post about “Palestine”. His piece is filled with the usual bile. Palestinian anarchy had “spewed forth” warlords. Arafat was an “evil” figure. Israeli withdrawal from Gaza had deprived Palestinians of the one “stabilising element” in the region. Phew! “Palestinianism” (whatever that is) is “superficial”. Palestinian “victimisation” is a “supreme myth of modern politics”. Gaza is now an “[Islamist] beachhead at the heart of the Middle East from which to infiltrate Egypt, Israel and the West Bank”.
So we are going to have yet another war in the Middle East, this time against Hamas – democratically elected, of course, but only as a result of what Pipes calls “the Bush administration’s heedless rush to Palestinian elections”? It’s good to see that the late Tony Blair is already being dubbed a “savant”. But shouldn’t Pipes, too, read Lawrence? For insurgency is a more powerful “vapour” than that which comes from the mouths of illusionists.
July 21, 2007
The National Post’s Don Martin chides our military for not producing “body counts” of the Taliban we kill. Martin apparently believes that the Canadian people need to know that we’re killing far more than we’re losing from our own side.
Canadians have just two confirmed and photographed Taliban kills to their credit in the past month, a sobering contrast to nine fallen soldiers at the hands of insurgents during the same time frame.
Just this week, 17 Afghan police officers were killed in various hot spots throughout the country, compared with only four dead Taliban.
There have got to be more enemy casualties, of course. Informed observers note Taliban fighters turned into a pink mist by aircraft bombing runs are not counted, although a bombed corpse is just as legitimately dead as a bullet-ridden one, in my view.
Martin thinks all Canadians need is a good, hefty Taliban body count and we’ll all rally to the mission. I don’t know what world Martin inhabits but it isn’t mine and I doubt that it’s yours either.
That “pink mist” he refers to is, unfortunately, all too common. The problem is that the mist could be the last traces of women or children taken out by airstrikes on villages. The last thing our military wants to do is to have to justify itself whenever it reduces a human being to a mass of protoplasm.
One of our common complaints about the Taliban is that they stubbornly refuse to stand up in some vacant field to let us kill them. In the time-honoured tradition of insurgents, they do use innocent civilians as there armour. Killing them often means killing civilians in the process.
Sorry, Don, but the fastest way to bleed the already dwindling support for “the mission” is to let Canadians see just how blunt and ugly and sometimes even indiscriminate counter-insurgency warfare can be.
July 20, 2007
Poor Tony Blair. He got out of office but only just before the mob showed up with tar and feathers. Then his real boss, George w. hisself, comes up with the brainwave to have Blair appointed “special envoy” to represent the UN, the US, the EU and Russia, in trying to sort out Middle Eastern problems, particularly the Palestinian dilemma.
The only bunch who don’t seem to be buying the Blair thing are the Arabs themselves. From The Guardian:
Israel is delighted he is getting involved but Arab reactions range from sceptical to openly hostile. “George Bush wanted to reward Blair for his hostility to the Arabs,” said Galal Nassar in Egypt’s Al-Ahram Weekly. “In backing Bush’s nominee the Quartet has endorsed a disastrous choice.” Columnist Rami Khouri wrote in Beirut’s Daily Star: “If there is an award for the combined negative credibility of an institution plus an individual, the Quartet and Blair should be its first recipients. Appointing Tony Blair as special envoy for Arab-Israeli peace is something like appointing the Emperor Nero to be the chief fireman of Rome.”
« Previous Page — Next Page »
The Mound of Sound 