Being "always on" is being always off, to something.
Breaking Through the Fog of War
Topic: War on Terrorism
12:28 pm EDT, Jul 6, 2007
Four years after the US invaded Iraq, a group of the war's veterans invaded the streets of New York. In a Memorial Day exercise, members of Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) donned their gear and reenacted military scenarios commonplace in the streets of Iraq. Using their hands as rifles, they shouted commands and crept around corners. Some scoured the streets for "Iraqi citizens," forcing them to the ground, cuffing, and hooding them.
The performance, captured in a video posted on the Nation, was meant to penetrate the detached and filtered haze that defines how most Americans view the war.
The country is at a crossroads, a different kind of place from where we've been before. The special interests seem more reactionary and entrenched than ever, the bureaucracies much larger. We need to marshal the courage to change, and we need to understand what needs changing.
Washington now is like the corrupt Tory England that the Whigs reformed. Whig liberalism brought growth. Our own Jeffersonian forerunners, the Founding Fathers, also rejected the Crown and understood the importance of small government.
Where the words “new history” appear, revisionism will follow.
Shlaes’s story line proposes instead that the nineteen-twenties, far from “a period of false growth and low morals,” were “a great decade of true economic gains” whose “faith in laissez-faire” was justified.
Shlaes hails his decision to leave the Presidency after five and a half years (thus ducking the crash and its consequences) as “another of Coolidge’s acts of refraining, his last and greatest.”
Sixty years ago, the National Security Act created a U.S. intelligence infrastructure that would help win the Cold War. But on 9/11, the need to reform that system became painfully clear. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence is now spearheading efforts to enable the intelligence community to better shield the United States from the new threats it faces.
Here's the wrap:
... the United States ... must not lose sight of the strategic conditions, ... must comprehend the profound threats of the times: terrorists, nuclear proliferators, and rogue and failed states.
It will take years to fully clarify and coordinate the DNI's responsibilities and powers, transform the collection and analysis of intelligence, accelerate information sharing, change institutional cultures, build high-tech capabilities, and boost the acquisition of new technologies. And it will take the patience of the American people and their willingness to lend their talent and expertise to the intelligence community.
Cowboy up! (There might even be some jewelry in it for you.)
The drugs business is by far the most profitable illicit global trade, says UNODC, earning some $320 billion annually, compared with estimates of $32 billion for human trafficking and $1 billion for illegal firearms. The runaway Afghan opium trade—worth around $60 billion at street prices in consuming countries—is arguably the hardest problem. Heroin is finding new routes to the consumer, for instance through West Africa to America, and via Pakistan and Central Asia to China.
The opium market puzzles experts. They say there is now an over-supply of opiates, but the price for farmers or drug users has not changed much. UNODC suspects opium is being hoarded, and that traffickers are squeezing their vast profit margins and increasing the purity of heroin doses to maintain stability.
!!! Now that would have been a great plot line for Stringer Bell on "The Wire"!
... Despairing of the failure of the anti-narcotics effort, formally led by Britain, which has focused on seeking alternative livelihoods for poppy farmers, the United States has been pushing for a more aggressive eradication campaign with aerial spraying. Its experts say that incentives alone will never work when farmers can earn eight or nine times more from poppy than from wheat. “You need a stick as well as a carrot,” says one senior American official.
Undersecretary of State John Bolton brushed aside a query about a carrot-and-stick approach to Iran with a subtle "I don't do carrots."
“Someone powerful obviously controls this area,” Wankel told Trammell. “The local authorities’ leaving has sent out the message that we’re unsafe and can be attacked. We should go.”
We climbed back up the bluff. Qassem was standing there with several of his men. Doug Wankel didn’t approach him. Marouf went to talk to Qassem, and then came back and told Wankel, “The police say you can eradicate there”—he pointed up to the other side of the road.
“Fuck the police,” [*, *] Wankel snarled, and he turned and walked away. He told his men that it was over.
I walked past one of the jeeps where some of Qassem’s policemen, dressed in robes and sparkly skullcaps, were laughing and talking with the opium growers. I caught a whiff of something burning as I passed. They were smoking hashish.
Back at camp, everyone was in a bad mood. Hook, the former prison guard, remarked, “We ought to take all those guys and hang them in public, beginning with the governor.” He laughed, and added, “Good thing I’m not an idealist—I’m just here for the money.”
50 Cent: Man, who ever said progress was a slow process wasn't talkin' 'bout me!
...
Young Buc: When your neck and wrist glow, she already should know / That money make the world go round, so let's get mo'
Hrm. Maybe jihad isn't punk after all. Maybe it's HIP-HOP.
And now I'm reminded of Lilly Allen's video for "LDN":
Hi. Um, I'm just wondering, have you got any kind of like, sort of punky, electronica, kind of grime, kind of like, new wave grime, kind of maybe like more broken beats, like kinda dubby broken beats, but a little bit kind of soulful ...? but kinda drum and bassy, but kinda more broken drum and bass, like sort of broken beats, like break-beat broken kind of drum and bass ... do you know what I mean? No?
As is often the way with young men who join cults, absorption into the world of the Islamists answered some of the author’s personal problems—his need for friends, for example, and for a sense of transcendent purpose. Alienation from his parents only confirmed his view that he was taking a courageous path.
We don't know what prompted Agence France-Presse to charter a helicopter Sunday and send one of their photogs to take a bunch of aerial shots of the city, and we don't know what prompted Getty Images to distribute those shots in the middle of the week, but we're glad they both did.
More gratuitous urban-beauty shots after the jump.
When it comes to comparing Iraq today to the Revolutionary War, well, there's a little something for everyone. If you just keep looking, I'm certain that you, too, can find an analogy that confirms your opinion.
The real inference to be drawn is that the American colonies were as well-fit for a democratic union as any society in human history—and they took more than a decade to get their act together. Today's Iraq enjoys almost none of their advantages, so how long will it take to move down the same path—and how long will we have to stay there to help?
Americans love gumption. We believe that stupid ideas become brilliant ones if you just keep working on them with bullish tenacity.
Filled with ingenious contraptions and overweening jerry-rigs, "The Adaptation" remakes "Raiders of the Lost Ark" on less than 1/2,000th of Paramount's original $20 million budget, conjuring exotic locales out of cardboard sets in parents' basements, casting tweens in Boy Scout uniforms as Nazi bad guys, and rolling a gigantic hand-crafted boulder through the family garage to create the film's signature scene. Nothing short of slapdash spectacular, The Adaptation is indie (or Indy?) filmmaking taken to its greatest and most sublimely ridiculous extreme.
Computer files maintained by a "cyber-terrorist" gang in the United Kingdom included a threat by 45 Muslim doctors said to be planning an attack on the Mayport Naval Base in Jacksonville, Fla., and other US sites using car bombs and rocket grenades.
Jacksonville is a target!?
Of 3 plotters arrested, two are biochemistry students and one is a law student.
