Ah, the difficulties of being an adult. From the excellent Oatmeal:
Too often after news occurs there is no follow-up. There are devastating hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes, wars, droughts, famines, and attacks. And too often there is no follow-up. There is no report of how people are doing, of how things are going. We rush off to report on the next disaster, man-made or natural, without considering what we can learn from events just occurred.
Of the many devastations mentioned ‘attacks‘ are the most definably perpetuated by people. They are often described as terrorist attacks. Attacks designed to create terror. Are there attacks not designed to create terror? Naturally, only the ones initiated by us, against those who are not us.
Norway has some interesting lessons for us. There was an attack there, which the news was quick to call a terrorist attack – and which the news media said, without evidence and with conjecture, was initiated by those who are not us, i.e. Muslims. Facts were quick to prove the news media wrong. The attack, which instilled terror – a terrorist attack – was done by a white, blonde-haired, blue-eyed Christian (he says he was Christian; he didn’t practice a different religion. We’ll leave it at that).
When the United States was attacked on September 11, 2001, the world condoled and consoled the United States. Help was offered; the attacks were condemned. In response, the United States developed a ‘you’re either with us or against us’ attitude, shuffled bureaucracies around to create departments like Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, and created the Department of Homeland Security. A culture of Islamophobia also resulted.
The comparison between the attack of September 11 and the attack in Norway is an unfair comparison, because the attacks on September 11 were executed by non-citizens, while Norway was attacked by a citizen. One attack was executed by people of various nationalities, some of whose homelands the United States attacked in response. Norway is hardly going to attack itself. Norway may not even strengthen security. “There has been no visible debate on gun laws or even on the sale of fertilizer, used by the attacker. Neither has there been calls for stricter legal punishment, Norway has 21 years as its maximum prison sentence. The limits to rhetoric in public debates have not been addressed.” Even if a closer monitoring of computers could have prevented the attack, that’s not what Norwegians want. “The first aid kit for social renewal has been commonly accepted as more openness, more democratic involvement, more transparency, less speculative rhetoric, less suspicion.” That’s the Way for Norway. We could give it a try.
Boy, do I admire satirist Jason Linkins. He takes that which is inherently worthy of a laugh – politics – and allows us to laugh about it. Despite the fact that he is in the Beltway – of perhaps because he is a comedian within it – Jason Linkins manages to frequently write about topics that the mainstream media ignores. For instance:
See, what’s happening is that the Treasury Department, acting in concert with some other federal agencies, has submitted a “Request For Information” about this big pile of sad homes we “won” in the financial inferno of 2008. As the article notes, the point of an RFI is to stage a private sector consultation about the best way forward. However, the private sector interests here have already come up with the plan — the federal government just has to go through these motions to make whatever comes next technically legal, while hoping that taxpayers don’t loudly object. If there’s no massive protest, the federal government will proceed to make a bargain-basement offer for this housing portfolio.
This is a fascinating Associated Press article which I first saw in the Santa Barbara News Press. Like most newspapers, the News Press is good producing boring, empty, non-news, you-can-read-it-anywhere articles. Occasionally, though, the newspaper tells the truth and sometimes there’s an interesting story.
Did you ever think about commercial fishing in Milwaukee? You might want to become a historian if you are interested in the subject. “It’s mid-April and the gray-haired fisherman and his gray-haired son are not headed out for just another day of hoisting nets from the depths of Lake Michigan.” There are fish, but no commercial fishing ventures. “Today, for the first time since the 1800s, there are no commercial fishing boats operating out of Milwaukee.”
” By 1938, Wisconsin’s commercial fishing operations were motorized and mechanized and generated jobs for more than 2,000 workers. They were dropping enough nets in state waters, mostly in Lake Michigan but some in Lake Superior, as well, to stretch from Milwaukee to the Eastern Seaboard, and back. And those nets were still pulling 14 million pounds of fish out of Lake Michigan a year.” This was a decrease from the 41 million pounds a year in 1900, but still significant and impressive.
“The decline of the (commercial) fishery going on right now in Lake Michigan and Huron doesn’t have anything to do with overfishing,” says David Lodge, a biologist and Great Lakes expert at the University of Notre Dame. So what happened?
Changes in the food web that appear to be driven by invasive mussels. The primary suspect is the quagga mussel, which arrived in the Great Lakes as a stowaway in the ballast tanks of freighters that carried them across the Atlantic. Still a rare find in Lake Michigan until just several years ago, the mollusks mysteriously and suddenly went viral. Today they smother the bottom of the lake almost from shore to shore, and their numbers are estimated at 900 trillion. Almost unfathomable, and each “quagga can filter up to a liter of water per day, stripping away the plankton that for thousands of years directly and indirectly sustained the lake’s native fish.”
For fishermen, when there are no fish left their livelihood is gone. It would be like, for farmers, some invasive worm sucking all the nutrients out of the soil. When the fishing is gone, the stores who prepare the fish, package the fish, and sell the fish also suffer. “Jeff Ewig stands in a blue smock behind the counter of Ewig Brothers Fish Company with a sign that says: ‘We are out of smoked chubs for the season. The soonest they would again be available is late next winter, ifwe can find a new supplier.’ Today Ewig and his son hang on to the family fish-smoking wholesale and retail operation any way they can, selling Alaskan halibut, farmed South American salmon, lobster tails, haddock, cod and tilapia, as well as some Great Lakes smoked fish, often from Lake Superior. But “their specialty used to be Lake Michigan chubs.” There are no options to sue and no one to blame.
What do the fishermen do? Dan – the son of a fishermen who has been on the same boat since he was eight, in 1944, and who himself grew up on the boat – is planning to move his wife and three kids to Alaska in the coming months. He’s got a boat in Alaska, and after years of boating in Alaska there for several weeks each summer he is ready to make the place home. He says this is the only choice he has because he can catch more fish in one day in Alaska than he can catch all winter off Milwaukee. “I’m not leaving” Lake Michigan, Dan says. “The lake left me. It’s gone.”
I haven’t seen this film, and today is the first day in theaters, but this sounds fascinating. Circumstance is “set in contemporary Iran in the unseen world of Iranian youth culture, filled with underground parties, sex, drugs and defiance, CIRCUMSTANCE is the story of two vivacious young girls — wealthy Atafeh and orphaned Shireen — discovering their burgeoning sexuality and, like 16 year-old girls anywhere, struggling with their desires and the boundaries placed upon them by the world they were born into.” It doesn’t claim to be completely accurate – in fact, it’s fiction, like so much of Hollywood and Baliwood – but like all fiction that isn’t science fiction, it is based on reality and possibility.
There is criticism of the movie – often from older Iranian men, naturally. “Keshavarz understands that many people will be upset by her deliberately provocative film, saying ‘people are threatened by the film, and not just the issues of sexuality, but it also deals with repression and how it affects individuals. They’re really unnerving topics, and they’re addressed in different ways in Iran. They can’t show the scenes that I do and that’s uncomfortable for them. But I think it’s good to have that discomfort.'”
Perhaps someday this movie or a movie like this will sell the most tickets at the box office. Or maybe I’m just a dreamer. I hope you join me in my mighty dream.
“It is a time for watching and waiting to see how things are going to turn out. It is a time to think how we are going to assure the security of Israel’s citizens in the southern part of the country from daily rocket attacks, and make sure that those living in the north and the center of the country do not share their fate,” writes Moshe Arens, former member of the Knesset (Likud). In 1982, Arens became the Israeli ambassador to the United States for a year, before returning to Israel to become Defense Minister. Arens served as Foreign Minister from 1988 to 1990. Arens became defense minister again between 1990 and 1992, retired from politics, only to return in 1999 to the same portfolio.
Moshe Arens is a rational voice with a rational argument – “let’s wait and see how things are going to turn out.” However, I’m not sure I could disagree with him more – not because he makes a states a sensible conservative philosophy, but because he argues that “It is a time to put away the placards calling for ‘Peace Now’ and ‘An End to the Occupation.’ It may be the time for those demanding ‘social justice’ for the “middle class” to fold their tents.” So it’s the middle class of the tent cities, the advocates for peace, that are the distraction from enhancing the national security state. It’s a fascinating political philosophy that says “we’ll be safer if we just beat a few more people up.”
Even more than dissuading the middle class from protesting cost of living and quality of life, Arens is writing about a changing world. He begins his introduction to this changing world by mentioning that “John Maynard Keynes, the great economist, once said in a debate: ‘When the facts change I change my mind, what do you do, sir?'” The world is changing. We’re talking about a world where Egypt is transitioning from dictatorship to democracy, a civil war in Libya is ending to ensure the same, and the dictatorship of Syria has been unable to shoot and bomb its own people into silence. Yes, the world is changing.
What I have not seen is that ‘when the facts change I change my mind, what do you do, sir?’. I make no pretense that a change in fact will change my mind, or that my mind will not change without seeing a change in fact. It is understandable, but not sensible, to me that Arens would speak of changing his mind when the facts are changed. The facts have been changed; he documents this clearly. His mind has not been changed, a mind that says only security state, security state, security state. How you secure the state is another matter.
The revolution/revolt/civil war of Libya is not quite over, but general consensus says the rebels have defeated the no-longer-legitimate government of Muammar Gaddafi, and the rebels have captured Gaddafi’s son. The post-Gaddafi Libya is being considered. As with all changes it is unique, but it can serve as an excellent case study for transition of leadership in any country – democratic or authoritarian. Some of the problems for Libya in the short term, based on guesses of a writer in Benghazi, include,
- There are lots of privately-organized militias or “kitaeb”, 40-plus at last count. They are mostly unpaid volunteers, usually from one particular town or region. The nucleus of one of the largest — Benghazi’s 17 February Martyrs brigade, is a computer company. Several hours of tracer fire over Benghazi’s skies last night bore witness to how many weapons are in private hands, and how much people like to fire them. They are bound together by group solidarity engendered by the fighting of some pretty hard battles, and while right now they say they just want to get rid of Qaddafi, rebel forces also frequently develop a strong sense of entitlement.
- Qaddafi still has a base of support, or — just as dangerously — groups that will be perceived by the victorious rebels as bases of support. The NTC have tried to bring in representation from as many different tribes as possible, and some of the larger groups allied to Qaddafi — like the Warfalla — are big enough that the perception of regime ties will simply be diluted by their numbers. However, it’s going to be very difficult to make the colonel’s own tribe, the Gadadfa, feel like they are full partners in the new Libya. The Gadadfa dominate the highly inconveniently located town of Sirte, which blocks the main east-west highway, and also share control over the oasis town of Sebha. Sebha in particular is a dangerous spot because there was an uprising in June by the Awlad Suleiman against the Gadadfa, and when two groups live in extremely close proximity and think each other a mutual threat, some very nasty violence can result.
- Thanks to Qaddafi’s obsession with a façade of Libya has no experience of party politics, and competing interests. NTC is a rather lawyerly bunch who often seems to lack political acumen. They engendered a lot of criticism last week for announcing an interim constitution, supposedly without proper consultation. Rebel officials said that they needed to get a document out to be fully recognized by the UN and to get ahold of Qaddafi’s frozen funds, but the move seen as a power play by NTC deputy chairman Abdel Hafez Ghoja.
- One danger here is that as soon as the revolutionary euphoria wears off, inevitably people will start imagining that the remnants of the old regime have just gone underground and are plotting a comeback, cutting nefarious deals with the NTC to remain in power. One or two mysterious bombs or assassinations can easily spark a panic, and the next thing you know you’ll have katibas demanding that they retain their arms to “safeguard the revolution.” There’s no way that the NTC can stop this, but they should be careful to be as inclusive and as transparent as possible.
And, just as importantly, some things are not perceived as problems.
- The combination of foreign airstrikes — which rebels realize saved them, albeit without foreign ground forces which would inevitably antagonize people — gives the West leverage without creating a backlash. Foreign interference is not a dirty word here: one katiba member I met in Ajdabiya said that the first thing he wanted to do after victory was buy a sheep, and bring it to Sarkozy to slaughter in Sarkozy’s honor. This means that proposals like bringing in the UN to help with the transitional process, as some Libyan politicians have proposed, is probably going to be broadly acceptable. Also, when NTC member Mahmoud Jibreel says that fighters should not loot or commit reprisals because the “eyes of the world are upon us”, his logic is actually appreciated by fighters on the ground.
- There seem to be few divisive differences over the identity of the country — Libya is tribally and ethnically diverse, but pretty homogenously Sunni and conservative. In order to whip up radical Islamist populism, it really helps to have some kind of Other — be they crony capitalists, nefarious secularists who want to sneakily impose atheism through supraconstitutional principles, Baathists, Shia or others who practice scandalous rituals, or other “heretics”, Tartar military dictators, etc. There aren’t any of these in Libya.
Kuna Gaza. We Are All Gaza. When we say We Are All Gaza, that means we feel empathy for Gazans; that is, we have an understanding of their emotions and feelings. Today, now, always, We Are All Gaza. We may also be Wisconsinites, and Minnesotans, and Californians (“California has the 2nd highest unemployment rate in the nation. Out of 58 counties, 52 are suffering from double-digit unemployment – 21 of which exceed 15%. One county, Imperial, has an astonishing unemployment rate of over 30%!”), and South Sudanese, and Israelis, and all others with whom we feel empathy.
Why on this day, and on all other days, should we all be Gazans?
Neither the circumstances, let alone the actual perpetrators of the attack on Israel have been identified so far, every Palestinian military faction has denied any involvement in it. But Gaza is blamed, as Gaza is always to be blamed for, Gaza must be punished, Gazan blood must flow so that the murder on Israelis will be avenged.
How much blood must still flow, you Israeli generals? How many Mahmouds [aged 13] and Maleks [aged 2] will have to die, how many women and children will have to be injured and killed? The signs suggest that it will still be many. And the signs suggest that the world is going to accept it. That it will accept that innocent people are being killed who had nothing but nothing to do with the attack on Israel.
But of course Palestinians must be “punished”, simply because they are Palestinians. I was at the protests against the Israeli embassy in Cairo. There were also Egyptian soldiers being killed. “Regrettable”, called Ehud Barak, the Israeli defense minister, the incident. Since when is it just a pity when you kill the soldiers of your neighboring country. The people outside the embassy were angry, they demanded the expulsion of the ambassador, removed the Israeli flag and replaced it with an Egyptian one.
As we speak, Gaza is being bombed. As we speak, innocent people are dying. If Israel doesn’t experience any resistance, any outcry, any appeal from the world public to act carefully, then a new massacre will happen. A ‘Cast Lead’ two. In which 1382 people were murdered in three weeks, including 320 children.
We in the West are told war is just when it is against the ‘other’ – the non-believer, the native, the foreigner, the terrorist, the Communist – and we in the West are in an unusually strong technological power and economic capacity to wage war on the ‘other.’ Therefore, we also have an unusually strong need to feel empathy for those who need our help (there are few who don’t). We the West are not the only ones who make war or sanction violence, but our unprecedented deterrent ability renders us, we think, safe from attack and free to attack others. Those ‘others,’ then, think themselves threatened, and rightly so when oppression of the ‘others’ brings about war, regardless of the perpetrator or initiator.
Why are we All Gaza now? After all, wasn’t there a ceasefire? Yes, but besides the necessity of empathy for those who are in occupied territory and those who are suffering, “a Hamas official on Sunday said that all of Gaza’s militant groups had agreed to a ceasefire with Israel, starting at 9 p.m. on Sunday evening, but as attacks continued through the night, fears about the implementation of the cease fire surfaced.” The need for us – American, Israeli, United Nations citizens; Jews, Muslims, Christians and others – to stand with Palestine as they seek the right self-determination is continuing, and we hope, demand, and act that that need will end soon. Until then, We Are All Gaza.
South Sudan is the world’s newest country, but that doesn’t prevent serious security problems.
More than 185 people have been killed in South Sudan in a recent cattle raid and an unrelated militia attack, officials said Sunday.
South Sudan army spokesman Col. Philip Aguer said fighters loyal to rebel leader George Athor crossed the border from north Sudan and attacked a town in South Sudan’s Upper Nile state. Aguer said the violence which started Friday left 60 people dead, including seven soldiers and 53 militia members. He said the soldiers managed to repel the attackers.
Separately, South Sudanese officials said Sunday 125 people were killed in a cattle raid during which tribesmen stole 2,000 cattle in the country’s east. Jonglei state Governor Kuol Manyang Juuk said eight villages were destroyed when warriors from the Murle tribe in Pidor county attacked the Lou-Nuer tribe of Uror county on Thursday.
The two tribes frequently clash over land and cattle. In May, nearly 70 people were killed in a weeklong cattle-related conflict between the two rival tribes.
The May cattle raid happened near water points in Jonglei state when ethnic Nuer tribesmen allegedly attacked the area and drove off with more than 100,000 cattle owned by the Murle.
The Dole Blog 