Dan Feidt's log on Minnesota, Information Operations, spinstorms and latent contradictions.
Check out this 50-state composite survey of whether Bush broke the law in the wiretapping scandal. It certainly breaks down along red/blue lines, but it is still good to see that, say 39% in Virginia think he broke the law, to only 36% who think he didn't.
We are this close to starting the apocalypse. Isn't that fabulous?!
Bush Adviser Foresees Iraq Violence Lull
WASHINGTON - President Bush's national security adviser said Sunday that Iraqi leaders had "stared into the abyss" and determined that sectarian violence was not in their interest.
Although bombings and other attacks have surged in the last week, Stephen Hadley expressed optimism in the light of statements from Iraqis who have condemned the attacks and pledged to move forward with building a unity government.
"It is a time of testing for Iraqis," Hadley said on CBS' "Face the Nation."
"They've stared into the abyss a bit, and I think they've all concluded that further violence, further tension between the communities, is not in their interest," he said.
The cumulative Iraqi death toll since the shrine situation reached at least 400 today. And yet again this is presented as evidence that "the terrorists are getting desperate." Thanks for that insight.
MySpace machinations. I thought this sounded eerily familiar, as adults spazz out about MySpace, now that the kids have literally nowhere to hang out in RealSpace anymore. Wired on it:
The profile the Hermitage, Pennsylvania, Hickory High School student bestowed on his principal was not kind. For "birthday" he listed "too drunk to remember." And for vital stats like eye and hair color he wrote, simply, "big" -- a poke at the educator's girth that he managed to weave into most of the 60-odd survey questions in Trosch's fictional profile: Do you smoke? "Big cigs." Do you swear? "Big words." Thoughts first waking up? "Too … damn … big."
The teen told some friends at school about the gag. Big mistake.
As a judge would later put it, "word of the parody … soon reached most, if not all, of the student body of Hickory High School," and the fake MySpace profile, along with several less nuanced commentaries crafted by other students, became a monster hit at the school. The administration banned student PC use for six days, canceling some classes, while they traced the profile to 17-year-old senior Justin Layshock, who promptly confessed and apologized.
"We grounded him and didn't allow him on the computer for two weeks," says Layshock's mother, Cherie Layshock. But the school had stronger medicine in mind. Layshock was suspended for 10 days, then transferred into an alternative education program for students incapable of functioning in a regular classroom.
A gifted learner who had been enrolled in advanced-placement classes and tutored other kids in French, Layshock spent the next month in a scaled-down three-hour-a-day program where a typical assignment saw students building a tower out of paper clips as a lesson in teamwork. The punishment led to an ACLU lawsuit that is ongoing, and garnered the school district a slew of critical stories in the local papers.
Wherein they make the point that (public) schools can't really control the speech of students at home. The concept of digital satire, ah, so attractive, the Siren Song of mocking bastards at school. Well I learned that lesson the hard way. Anyway.
Afghanistan is intrinsically rebellious, and that is pretty much all you need to know:
Afghan, Nato and US forces surrounded the main high security prison in Kabul yesterday with tanks after it was taken over by more than 1,500 Taliban and Al-Qaida prisoners during a violent riot. At least 30 prisoners were injured and unconfirmed reports said seven others were killed in fighting after inmates took two women prison guards hostage in protest at new regulations requiring them to wear uniforms.
Bursts of gunfire could be heard throughout the day from Pulicharkhi prison after the Afghan police rapid reaction unit, armed with rocket-propelled grenade launchers, entered the complex in an attempt to prevent a mass break-out. Prisoners were heard chanting “Allah-o-Akbar” in between the firing.
Pulicharkhi, which holds around 2,000 prisoners, became notorious during Afghanistan’s Communist era with allegations of torture and secret executions. About 110 detainees held by the US at Guantanamo Bay are expected to be transferred there later this year.
The prisoners had allowed 70 women inmates to be moved to another part of the prison after storming into the female wing from their own. As night fell, negotiations announced by the Interior Ministry to end the stand-off were suspended. Security forces had yet to gain access to parts of the jail under the prisoners’ control.
“I have heard that prisoners have been injured. Taliban and Al-Qaida members from different countries are behind this unrest,” said the Deputy Justice Minister, Mohammad Qasim Hashimzai. “They still control the wing from where they had started the riot. They have demands; we are going to listen to what they want. If we cannot solve it through negotiations, we have our own options.”
If the United States and NATO cannot administer Kabul's main prison, are they really going to be able to check the heroin industry or even deal with (let alone attempt to dominate) the various heavily armed ethnic factions?
The Soviet Union was defeated here, bankrupting them. The British were defeated here (twice - perhaps thrice depending how you score it), expending a huge amount of cash from the India colony, and ultimately helping drag down British-Indian colonization. And now, NATO and the United States cannot control the Afghani equivalent of Abu Ghraib. To me, this is totally in keeping with the pattern of history.
After all, they've had opium since Alexander the Great stopped by. [maybe apocryphal, but sounds good].
And of course America's Iran paranoia is skating off into a dimension all its own. Google News 'Iran Nuclear' search:
Results 1 - 50 of about 64,400 for iran nuclear
A final note. Let me introduce a nice old map from the Great Game. Via Wikipedia's recommended Great Game history, a really subtle HongPong.com geopolitical illustration:
That's Persia in Blue. 1848. Good times. (Also note that Kuwait didn't exist)
Posted by HongPong at February 28, 2006 05:18 PM