Apparently, according to Newt, America’s current economic woes stem from two sources: greedy middle school janitors and unemployed children.There's more, and all of it equally on target.
Newt’s solution? Fire the janitors, hire the kids.
Like chocolate and peanut butter, or feeding the homeless to the hungry, kids and janitorial work naturally go together. It’s just so, so obvious when Newt points it out, isn’t it?
Fire the janitors, hire the kids.
Brilliant.
First we recoup billions in janitor salaries.
Those goddamned janitors and their outrageous salaries. Who can forget those greedy maintenance men commuting to school each morning? Their private helicopters landing on the roof of the gymnasium, flying in from the Hamptons after a weekend of booze, blow and hookers? Their chauffer driven limos blocking the school bus loading zones? Oh yes, let us never forget who caused this financial disaster, them with their 24K gold handled mops and gilded toilet plungers while our children could barely afford to chew gum and stick it to the bathroom mirrors? I tell you, nothing chaps my ass more than when those key-twirling broom jockeys took billions in taxpayer bailouts and then gave themselves millions in bonuses. Personally I think it’s a Goddamned outrage that they get taxpayer funded lifetime pensions and golden parachutes even after being found guilty of ethics violations and forced to resign from their jobs. Honest to God, folks, how many more countries could we have invaded if these jumpsuit wearing sons of bitches weren’t bleeding us dry? How many more faith based programs could we have funded? How many high school girls had to graduate because those damned janitors stole money for abstinence only birth control classes? How many aircraft carriers could we have built? Ask yourself this, how many more tenured history professors could we have hired if we hadn’t had to pay those stinkin’ greedy Janitors? Hell, we could have filet mignon and caviar in the Congressional lunchroom three meals per day instead of, well, ok bad example, but I think I’ve made my point here.
Shakespeare didn’t have Romeo and Juliet commit suicide in the first act, and then let the remaining characters pitch tents on the stage and chat aimlessly for the remaining four acts. That was because Shakespeare was a dramatist. His aim was to move people to emotion, to make them think, to shock, horrify, or delight them. Let us, for the sake of argument, assume that he was pretty good at it. Today’s protesters could learn a thing or two from him.Read the whole thing.
As I mentioned in Part 1, the Occupy protest movement began by taking advantage of new methods (the social media), and then quickly reverted to an old formula. The advantage that social media offered was the ability to bring people together quickly to do some strategic and dramatic thing —- to surprise. The “flash mob” is the appropriate template for a protest using social media. The flash mob originated as an amusement —- one in Toronto called people to a pillow fight in front of the Eaton Centre. There have been some political protests using this technique, and these have been dubbed “smart mobs,” but their use has been very limited, so far. The key to the flash mob’s effectiveness is its ability to end as dramatically as it begins. This leaves those in authority disconcerted, and makes them look incompetent. It has the same advantage in protest that guerilla tactics can have in military conflicts.
The Occupy movement has squandered the opportunity to move into the modern age of protest. Social media were used to bring people together, but once there, power reverted to the traditionalists, and the only thing they could think of doing was squatting down and staying put. The smart mob turned into a “sit in,” a protest relic from a generation ago that is notorious for its ineffectiveness and tendency to alienate the very people that the protest is supposed to convince.
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If you speak to these old-schoolers, it won’t be long before you hear them prattle nonsense about how they are continuing the traditions of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950’s and 1960’s. They are deluding themselves. The Civil Rights activists were not amusing themselves. They did not go out on picnics. They were dealing with the Ku Klux Klan, and with corrupt and violent state governments in the American south. They were in constant danger. Civil Rights activists faced the serious possibility of being tortured or killed. Everything done was aimed at projecting an atmosphere of seriousness of purpose, and of clearly delineating the moral issues involved. Anyone who wants to see real protest in action could do no better than to study the events of the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1956. Protests like this led to a gigantic transformation of American society, one of the most dramatic in world history. Take note of the fact that Martin Luther King, Jr. and Ralph Abernathy did not organize catfish fry-ups, sponsor watermelon eating festivals, or instruct their followers to dance the madison. They did not paint themselves blue. They rationally, intelligently, and bravely, calculated which actions would produce the desired results, and undertook them, making huge personal sacrifices to do so. The American public came to realise that it was the State Governments and the Klan who were the savages, the forces of chaos.
I have become progressively more annoyed with the Occupy movement because of its utter failure to heed these simple and obvious facts. We desperately need to get the American and Canadian public to understand the trouble we are in, and the dangers we face over the coming years. Intelligent protest is one of the things that has to be done. I’ve outlined some of the reasons why the protest we are seeing is not intelligent or effective. Next, in Part 3, I will discuss the types, dynamics, and structure of protest.
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Not long into the film, I felt that I had an urge to scream, “Say something for God’s sake!” when immediately the facial expression of an actress shuts me up, saying, “What is there to say. Don’t you see?”No, I don’t see if there is no talk, no laughter, no crying, no discussions, no debates, no complaints, no questions, no answers, not a single complex sentence. But why?“We are in strange land my dears, where language has gone through a massive transformation. Language as the medium for communication has lost its function where communication has lost its place in the society and culture, where the efforts are made to hide rather than reveal, where one must divert rather than to direct, where one has to misguide rather than to guide; then words are better forgotten if one has to lie,” I’m whispering to myself.Lips do not kiss, hands do not touch, gazes are afraid to connect. It is not restraint but hiding. There is no need for censorship since there is not even any desire for of any sort expression. There is still an outcry for an “empty nest,” an empty room, a dangling key to an empty apartment. It seems that finding “that key” is the ultimate goal, though I’m not so sure that there is anything but darkness behind the closed door. Even passion is absent …But little by little, I learn to hear them. I learn their language. It is very simple, their facial expressions, sweet faces with bitter and sad expressions, tell us of boredom, aimlessness, hopelessness, very gently and good-naturedly. But beneath those bitter expressions on those faces, those cold faces, those deadly silences, one can see the residue of some drive, of some hope and some faint and colorless shadow of something that might once have been a dream or fantasy.They narrate their own story, as if the film were a documentary and had been made spontaneously, with actors and actresses, without script, on stage thriving to tell their stories. It seems they have something to say only if they find someone to listen, if they feel safe, if they find privacy, if they know how....
All that said, I can’t say that I’m a big fan of the “Occupy” movement. When social media made if possible for a broad range of people to make their disatisfaction known, it had a salutory effect. If that technology had been used to draw people to specific places, where they could engage in some surprising and dramatic symbolic activity, then equally quickly disappear, leaving the authorities to wonder what would happen next, and the public eager to understand what it was all about, then it would have had even more impact. But, instead, things instantly reverted to the accepted formulae. Camping out on the protest site for some undetermined time is just plain dumb. Now, of course, it’s the old-school, old-fart habitual protesters back in control, and those people don’t have the slightest interest in changing anything. There is no group of people more stuck in the past, more hide-bound with orthodoxy, and more ill-suited for intelligent protest
The number of rabies cases in Ontario's foxes, skunks, raccoons and livestock has just doubled. But paradoxically, this doubling is a minor blip.
Through most of 2011 there had been only a single rabies case in the entire province. As of last week, there are two. One new case was enough to double the total.
Two rabid animals, in the province that was once the rabies capital of North America, with thousands of confirmed cases a year.
One of the most stunning victories in the fight against infectious disease has been fought and won in Ontario, which had more than 3,000 cases of "terrestrial" rabies (meaning all animals except bats) in 1980.
Back then, Ontario had more rabies than all other provinces and U.S. states combined. The disease threatened children, hunters, livestock, and household pets.
For reasons never really understood, today's commonest strain of rabies crept south from Arctic foxes in the 1950s, spreading in animals' saliva along Hudson Bay to Ontario, where it stayed - not just in foxes, but commonly in skunks and raccoons too.
It's almost all gone now. And a strain called raccoon rabies, which spread north from Florida, has been completely wiped out in Ontario since 2005.
The strange story of how we rid the province of nearly all rabies is a combination of vaccine research, animal psychology, and the skill of bush pilots.
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Here's what happened. Around 1980, someone had the bright idea of vaccinating wildlife against rabies. After all, it works in dogs and cats.
Obviously the problem was delivering the drug in the wild.
The solution was blindingly simple: Put oral vaccine in meatballs. A government airplane flies low with a pilot, navigator and bombardier, and they drop vaccine-laced bait onto the land below.
The bait also contains tetracycline, a common antibiotic that stains an animal's teeth brown. That reveals what proportion of wild animals are taking the bait.
He goes on to discuss what outsiders might do to help.A tense subplot of the Arab Spring is the increasing endangerment of the region’s Christians. In Egypt, Coptic Christians, 10% of the population, have been attacked repeatedly by Salafist Muslims unleashed – many literally released from prison -- by the fall of President Hosni Mubarak. No wonder that Christians in Syria now fear their fate at the hands of the country’s Sunni Muslim majority should President Bashar al-Assad’s government fall.The experience of Christians in Iraq is hardly encouraging, either. The kidnapping and murder of Chaldean Catholic Archbishop Paulos Faraj Rahho by Muslim militants in early 2008 is emblematic of what Iraq’s Christian community has suffered since the fall of Saddam Hussein. The population of Iraqi Christians has declined from around two million to around 400,000 since the Gulf War of 1991, which weakened Hussein’s rule. Under the dictatorships of Mubarak, Assad, and even Hussein and Qaddafi, all of them unsavory to be sure, Christians enjoyed relative security, though it was sometimes bloodily interrupted and usually attended by pervasive social discrimination. Arab authoritarianism was a leaky shelter but it was nevertheless a roof over their heads.
But however dangerous Arab Christians’ fate now may be, going back to the good old days of dictatorships is not an option. The surge of democracy-demanding youth, popular impatience with corruption and economic stagnation, and a religious reawakening over the past generation all serve to block such a backslide. Of course, for other minorities and for Muslims at odds with their regimes, the good old days were not good at all. They were not good for the residents of Hama, Syria, 10,000 of whose inhabitants were murdered by the current president’s father, Hafez al-Assad; and they are not good for protesters of the son’s dictatorship, over 2900 of whom the regime has killed by now. They were not good for democracy activists or traditional Muslims in Egypt, over 20,000 of whom Mubarak held in his jails. Arab authoritarianism was a model that could not last. Apart from suppressing the dynamism of democracy and the free market, such regimes were repressively secular, creating legions of religious discontents and radicalizing traditional Muslims, often in the direction of violence. Ultimately this shelter for Christians proved to be not only leaky but rotten at its foundations.
The position of today’s Arab Christians is indeed precarious. Among the possible outcomes, Islamist regimes that afford Christians little freedom to practice their faith or participate in politics are entirely plausible. But this outcome is far from inevitable, no more inevitable than was the persistence of dictatorship. Only this past week, elections in Tunisia, the country that ignited the Arab Spring, gave a plurality of votes to an Islamic party, but one that is relatively liberal and that will rule in coalition with non-religious liberal parties. In Egypt, too, the possibilities are more complex than secularist safety and Salafist violence. When Christians are attacked it is not always at the hands of Muslims. The shooting of Christian demonstrators in Cairo this past October 9th was carried out by the army. When Muslims have attacked Christians, far more have defended them. Just after Muslim terrorists slaughtered 25 Coptic worshippers and injured some 100 others in Alexandria on New Year’s Day of this year, thousands of Muslims across the country gathered in candlelight vigils and formed human chains around Coptic churches during worship. Today, Egyptian Muslim office-seekers are divided among proponents of a strongly Islamic state and supporters of liberal rights, including religious freedom for Christians. The scenario of religious freedom, then, is plausible, too.
And then there’s Patrick McGovern, an archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania who, after analyzing the residue that lingers in the nooks and crannies of millennia-old potted vessels, is bringing ancient elixirs back to life. It’s gastronomical nostalgia on steroids.
McGovern, a pioneer in the field of biomolecular archaeology who did undergraduate work in chemistry and has a Ph.D. in Near Eastern archaeology, has collaborated on five beverages with Sam Calagione, the award-winning founder and president of Dogfish Head brewery in Delaware: Midas Touch, an Iron Age beer based on samples found in the king’s supposed tomb; Chateau Jiahu, a Chinese blend of grapes, rice and honey based on the oldest sample of booze ever discovered; Theobrama, a 3,200 year-old Honduran chocolate drink; Chicha, a corn beer with Peruvian lineage; and Ta Henket, an Egyptian ale being released in December with 18,000-year-old components.
Armed gangs defending their turf. Death threats and torched property. Victims too fearful to go to police.
Sounds like another organized-crime offensive on the streets of Montreal. But the action is playing out in a more improbable setting: the backwoods wilderness of Quebec during hunting season.
Generations of hunters have turned to the rugged forest of the Gaspé Peninsula each fall to bag a moose, but an explosive growth in the number of animals, coupled with growing competition for hunting spots, has turned nature’s idyll into a battleground.
Although Quebec sets aside vast swaths of Crown land for hunting, territory that in theory belongs to everybody, some take matters into their own hands to protect what they regard as their personal hunting spots.
The problem has come to a head on the Gaspé, where some 25,000 permit-holders descend in the forest in a nine-day firearm hunt lasting to late October. During that time, according to several officials and witnesses, a supposedly public playground gives way to roadblocks, armed patrols and less-than-subtle warnings by rival hunting gangs to keep out.
Some hunters are tasting the woods’ frontier justice firsthand. Michel Guénette is a 54-year-old truck driver who has been hunting in the Gaspé since he was a boy. Last year he discovered his family’s six trailers incinerated, with empty canisters of propane lying amid the rubble. When he showed up for the hunt this year, his tree blind was trashed.There's more where that came from.
The last stand at Sirte was very like Jim Jones’s last stand in the jungles of Guyana. Jones was an American religious leader who gradually went mad, demanding more and more sacrifice and obedience from the members of his People’s Temple congregation, which then gradually became a cult. I define a cult as a group wherein the leader makes very high demands for obedience and self-sacrifice, and the values of which diverge from those of mainstream society. When the outside world seemed clearly to be pursuing the People’s Temple into Guyana, with a Congressmen showing up in Jonestown to rescue a handful of adherents who wanted to go home, Jones reacted with fury, first sending a militia to kill the congressman and the defectors, and then instructing his followers to drink poisoned Kool-Aid. Many were injected with cyanide laced with liquids or shot. Those who would not agree voluntarily to be “translated” to the next world together with their messianic leader would be subjected to the ultimate coercion.
Qaddafi’s stand at Sirte underlined the cultish character of his politics,...
The final defeat of Qaddafi and Qaddafism is a victory for the Fourth Wave of democratization that began in Tunisia and continued in Egypt. There is now a contiguous bloc of 100,000,000 Arabs in North Africa who have thrown off dictatorship and aspire to parliamentary government (Tunisia’s elections are coming up on Sunday). Those who dismiss this movement because Muslim religious forces will benefit are exhibiting a double standard. Roman Catholicism benefited from Third Wave democracy movements like those in Poland and Brazil, as did Eastern Orthodoxy. Were democracy to break out in Burma, Theravada Buddhism would benefit. So what?
The Arab League, President Obama and NATO have been vindicated in their decision to forestall the massacre of eastern Libyan cities such as Benghazi. The region’s remaining bloodthirsty tyrants, who have not scrupled to massacre non-combatants for exercising their right of peaceable assembly and protest, should take the lesson that mass murder is a one-way ticket for them to the sewage drain of history. As I told the NYT today, ““The real lesson here is that there is a new wave of popular politics in the Arab world… People are not in the mood to put up with semi-genocidal dictators.”
And at cbcnews.ca:
So if the Libyans themselves hadn’t risen up in the first place, NATO wouldn’t have considered intervening, and Gadhafi would almost certainly still be alive and in charge.
That’s the lesson the Arab world takes away from Gadhafi’s fall, and it’s a valuable one.
Many if not most in the Arab world likely believe it was the Libyans who “got” Gadhafi.
In those pictures he was surrounded by Libyan fighters, not foreign troops. It is precisely the image — if not the exact circumstances — that both the NTC and NATO wanted right from the start, to avoid the Iraq mistake and the baggage that came with that.
Among Arabs those nuances count for a lot. And so those images will undoubtedly breathe new life into the flagging uprisings in Syria and Yemen. They will also give pause to the autocrats who still rule them.
Arab editorials in today's papers openly wondered who would be next in what they now willingly call the Arab Spring, and what might be on the minds of the possible candidates as they watched Gadhafi’s final moments.
It is a very different Arab world than it was when Saddam was caught. This Arab Spring, sparked singlehandedly by a desperate Tunisian young man, is all about people, and therefore legitimate in the eyes of most of the region. The old rules lurk behind the scenes, but they are weakening as the people continue to press for substantive change.
Even in countries where there has been no large scale protest, old regimes have clamoured to introduce change. Saudi Arabia would not have given women the right to vote and run in municipal elections without the Arab revolts. Jordan has had two governments resign in the span of months in the name of introducing reform.
The Arab Spring has been a messy affair, and it will continue to be, and in some countries, spring may never come. But in each of those countries where it has or will, it unfolds differently — as evidenced by those affected so far — and with different speeds and efficacy.
Having world powers on your side certainly seems to help--whether it's moral or military. In future, other revolutions may or may not involve foreign intervention, and we may yet see an example that involves only regional intervention, without the involvement of Western powers.
But the one common, requisite ingredient in all of them has been a willing people. People who have broken the barrier of fear, who refuse to remain silent — even after they might have managed to fell longstanding regimes, as in Egypt's case.
After now watching three strongmen fall in successively higher degrees of humiliation, you can bet the continuing uprisings will have a renewed momentum.
Arab Spring a failure so far
All in all, as noted above, a fine candidate for early departure from this life.
But that's as far as it goes. Other than that, Gadhafi's death demonstrates nothing more than the ability of Western militaries to cut down whomever they choose.
There will, no doubt, be attempts to portray his downfall and death as an example of what happens when a nation decides to rise up against tyranny and pursue its own destiny.
Americans, in particular, love that narrative, which is why the phrase "Arab Spring" is still so popular in the mainstream media here.
The fact is, the Arab Spring, if it even existed, has been a sputtering failure so far. It certainly didn't even threaten Gadhafi. He was hunted down by NATO military power, plain and simple.
Had it not been for NATO warplanes, Gadhafi would still be in command, violently persecuting his own people.Image: And the women?
Here’s what Tyerman (page 31) says about a famous Christian account of the massacre:
Raymond of Aguilers… who witnessed the fall of Jerusalem in 1099, described the ensuing massacre on the Temple Mount: "it is sufficient to relate that in the Temple of Solomon and the portico crusaders rode in blood to the knees and bridles of their horses." What ever the atrocities performed that day, Raymond was quoting Revelations 14:20 "and the winepress was trodden without the city and the blood came out of the winepress even to the horse bridles."
Two further points:Comments? [No comments from students.]
Here are my comments. Massacres of garrisons and the civil population of fortifications and cities that had resisted for a long time were pretty common in medieval times. According to the laws of war (or the customs of war) those who resisted, even if they were not armed and had no authority or say in the waging of war, brought the consequences of such resistance upon themselves. It was kind of a no-win situation because people who surrendered too quickly to a threat of siege might invite the revenge of their rulers if the rulers won the war eventually. But to focus on the other situation: we've already seen in this course that a siege was a hard task and a dangerous one even for the people outside. I sometimes joke that it is no real joke that sieges came down to who caught dysentery first, the people outside in their squalid camps, or the people inside crowded together in bad conditions. Besiegers died in significant numbers in a hard siege, and the numbers went up significantly if there were a number of unsuccessful assaults. Besiegers became targets for missiles thrown at them from above, and insults meant to break the morale and boost morale on the other side. When besiegers swarmed into a city through a gap in the walls or by the treachery of the tower commander, that they were not in a good mood all. All the anger fear and hardship came together in a murderous rage and perhaps a sudden feeling of invulnerability. Like hunters, they fell upon their prey, animate and inanimate.Further remark is necessary in the case of Jerusalem, however. Modern observers from the historically Christian environment often expressed wonder that the religion of peace and my kingdom is not of this world could have inspired warfare. Forgetting entirely about Muslim and Jewish accounts of the slaughter of Jerusalem, we can see just from Christian accounts that not only did nominal Christians take part in mass murder like anyone else, they felt more justified in doing so in this case because they had scriptural authority behind them. Those who took part and had read their Bible knew that this was God's will.
From the start of the Syrian revolution, the Assad regime's media have portrayed the overwhelmingly peaceful grassroots protest movement as a foreign-backed military assault. Its preferred catchall term to describe the tens of thousands of patriots it has kidnapped and tortured, as well as the thousands it has murdered, is "armed gangs." Despite a series of televised "confessions," the regime has not provided any serious proof of the supposed American-French-Qaeda-Israeli-Saudi-Qatari plot against the homeland. Nor has it explained the evident contradictions between its narrative and the thousands of YouTube videos and eyewitness accounts of security forces shooting rifles and artillery straight into unarmed crowds.
Of course it hasn't. Yet its propaganda is taken seriously by Russian and Chinese state media, certain infantile leftists, and a vaguely prominent American academic.
Tragically, the propaganda is also taken seriously by members of Syria's minority sects -- not by all of them by any stretch, but perhaps by a majority. It's tragic because perceived minority support for this sadistic regime will inevitably tarnish intersectarian relations in Syria in the future.
Those Sunni Syrians who are (understandably) enraged by the minorities' siding with the dictatorship should remember first that many Alawis and Christians, as well as many more Druze and Ismailis, have joined the revolution and that many have paid the price. Second, Sunnis should remember that Alawis and Christians have good reason to fear change, if not to believe the propaganda.
Alawis have a complex, esoteric religion that throughout history has been savagely denounced, and its adherents savagely oppressed. Ultimately it's a matter of political interpretation whether or not Alawis are to be considered Muslims. The Ottoman Empire didn't even consider them "People of the Book," which meant that unlike Christians, Jews, and mainstream Shiites, Alawis didn't enjoy any legal rights. The ravings of the influential medieval scholar Ibn Taymiyya (who thought Alawis were "greater disbelievers than the Jews, Christians, and Indian idol-worshipping Brahmans") contributed to their oppression and justified the theft of their lands around Aleppo and their forced retreat into the mountains. Until the 1920s, the Alawis were stuck in those mountains. Antakya (Antioch) was the only city where Alawis lived with Sunnis, and Antakya was gifted by France to Turkey before the independence of the modern Syrian state.
Most Alawis today are not particularly religious. Far from pushing Alawi tenets on the general populace, the Assads discouraged the study of the faith and repressed the traditional Alawi clerics. As a result, if individual Alawis do turn to religion, most tend to practice Sunni or mainstream Shiite rituals.
Of course, as far as the business of state is concerned, it should be entirely irrelevant whether or not Alawis are Muslims or even People of the Book. As Syrian citizens they should be guaranteed the same rights and the same access to political office as anyone else. It would help a great deal if revolutionary leaders and Sunni clerics were to state this as clearly and as often as possible. The blatant anti-Alawi sectarianism of Sheikh Adnan al-Arour (given prominence by Saudi Arabia) and Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi (given prominence by Al Jazeera), both supposed friends of the revolution, does not help at all. Speaking to "those [Alawis] who stood against us," Arour recently promised, "I swear by God we will mince them in grinders and feed their flesh to the dogs."
The one thing the regime has done intelligently in the last six months is to play on minorities' fears. ...
The two scenarios that most terrify the minorities (and almost everyone else) are, first, the rise of intolerant Islamism, and, second, sectarian civil war. Unfortunately, both scenarios become more likely with every moment the regime remains in power. The experience of being shot at, besieged, and tortured will inevitably drive some toward more extreme views. In addition, the military units slaughtering the people are overwhelmingly Alawi and commanded by Alawis. The regime's shabiha militias in Hama, Homs, and Latakia are Alawis recruited from the surrounding villages. These are the people torturing Sunni women and children to death, burning shops and cars, beating and humiliating old men. Their actions will have consequences. If the regime falls soon, the consequences will be legal and targeted solely at the guilty. If the regime doesn't fall soon, the consequences may be violent, generalized vigilante "justice." Then Iraq and Lebanon will become Syria's models.
The amount the U.S. military spends annually on air conditioning in Iraq and Afghanistan: $20.2 billion, according to a former Pentagon official.From Dan Froomkin at Huffington Post:
That's more than NASA's budget. It's more than BP has paid so far for damage from the Gulf oil spill. It's what the G-8 has pledged to help foster new democracies in Egypt and Tunisia.
"When you consider the cost to deliver the fuel to some of the most isolated places in the world — escorting, command and control, medevac support — when you throw all that infrastructure in, we're talking over $20 billion," Steven Anderson tells weekends on All Things Considered guest host Rachel Martin.
With just over three months until the last U.S. troops are currently due to leave Iraq, the Department of Defense is engaged in a mad dash to give away things that cost U.S. taxpayers billions of dollars to buy and build....
The most colossal relics of the U.S. invasion of Iraq will be the outsize military bases the Bush administration began erecting not long after the invasion, under the never explicitly stated assumption that Iraq would become the long-term staging area for U.S. forces in the region...
Most of the $2.4 billion was spent building about a dozen huge outposts that, in addition to containing air strips and massive fortifications also have all the comforts of home. The Al-Asad Airfield in Anbar province, for example, covers 25 square miles -- about the size of Boulder, Colo. -- and is known as "Camp Cupcake" due to its amenities.
The 15-square-mile Joint Base Balad, as Whitney Terrell wrote earlier this year for Slate, is "home to three football-field-sized chow halls, a 25-meter swimming pool, a high dive, a football field, a softball field, two full-service gyms, a squash court, a movie theater, and the U.S. military's largest airfield in Iraq."Imagine, a whole new Boulder in Iraq!
Why don’t the Christians in both Lebanon and Syria immigrate to Europe is allegedly what Sarkozy asked the Maronite religious leader on his recent visit to France. According to the article, Christians had no place in the Middle East given the clash between Christianity and Islam. The Maronite leader was shocked by what he heard which prompted the French leader to point to a document that cites how over three million Christians immigrated from Lebanon over the past 20 years and that the Middle East will face many problems in the future.One wonders, but not very much, what the French president thinks about all those Muslims in France.
Let’s take the lowest sensible estimate for classical Rome – half a million – and the highest for Rome c. 600, about 50,000. That means that the population has not only been decimated, but that it had been decimated nine times over. And what is more these heirs of Rome (as fashionable ‘late antique’ historians call them) were resident in an echo box; a city that they no longer had the technology to repair, let alone recreate, where nine out of every ten residences were empty, where three and four story buildings gradually keeled over into the streets and where the Parthenon and the Coliseum looked down mockingly on the little people below, not so much dwarfs on giants’ shoulders, as blue-bottles buzzing around a cow’s backside.
Then, remember, perhaps the actual population of Imperial Rome was more like a million and the population of Rome c. 600 was more like ten thousand, a hundredth of what it had been. The psychopathic Anglo-Saxon guard, the tourist from Scythia and the Pope and his tiny administration could shout as loud as they wanted and no one would have heard them in their ghost town. No one was listening, not even the red baked tiles made in a happier age.I have recently lived across the river from Detroit...so this is evocative. Detroit is not, however, quite so echoic.
Libya did not look as shabby or dangerous as Iraq. Despite six months of fighting and uncertainty, the lawns in Tripoli were mown, the bougainvillea bushes were bright, and the rubbish was still in garbage bags, not strewn, as in Basra, in suppurating ditches. The shops and petrol stations were reopening, the water supply was beginning to return. The armed 15-year-olds were polite. No one at any of the checkpoints asked for a bribe, or our satellite phones. The Misrata militia in their jeeps were as friendly as the Knights of Zintan in their pick-up trucks. There was little talk of revenge. No one was shooting anyone else.
And to my surprise, there was little looting. In the executive offices, it was not just the furniture and the televisions that were untouched: even the silver ashtrays and gold paperknives were still on the desks. It seemed that no one had slipped even a fountain-pen into their pocket when the government left and the rebels came in. At night, the streets of Tripoli were so jammed with honking cars, waving flags, boys wearing the national colours, that one might imagine Libya had just won the World Cup. The government and the police were not in any position to prevent disorder, but it seemed that the Libyans were not drawn to looting or violence. And no one I spoke to, from expatriate engineers to young gunmen, expected that.
Already people are claiming that the euphoria and calm after the fall of Tripoli could have been predicted and can be easily explained. But such civility was not inevitable; it could not have been assumed from Libyan history or culture. Libya shares many features of countries where anarchy has prevailed. Like Afghanistan or Iraq, it has a distinguished history and has experienced periods of stability but lacks the essential trinity of the international state-building apostles: ‘a vibrant civil society’, ‘rule of law’ and ‘good governance’. It has a rapidly growing young population, which is only partially educated, and few jobs. The traditional forces of tribe and Islam co-exist with more cosmopolitan aspirations, as they do in the rest of the Islamic world.
Many of the positive things that can be said about Libya can be said about other more troubled countries – right down to the small details.
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If we cannot come to any satisfactory conclusions on the London riots – a limited event, exhaustively documented, in our own capital – what sense can we make of why they did not riot in Tripoli?
You don't have to want to be a Christian crusader in the present, or even be a Christian, to have a vague positive feeling about those old holy wars. For example, the recent movie Kingdom of Heaven by implication condemns some aspects of crusading, especially fanatics who go too far, but does not condemn crusading or Crusaders completely. There are plenty of literary and film examples of this going back to Walter Scott in the early 19th century. This results in the nostalgic feeling that somewhere sometime there was a worthy crusade pursued by sincere people who even if they made some mistakes had good hearts.Then I asked my students if they had any such nostalgic feeling.
Abdullah represents what the government insists it is fighting. He is a Salafist, an adherent to a puritanical Islam, though he disavows the term. To him, Salafists bear arms, and he understands that the moment he and others fire a bullet in Homs or anywhere else, the regime will have the justification it covets to crush them with even more force. But there was no question of his devotion to a state that adheres to Islam as its foundation, and he dismissed the comparatively liberal rhetoric of some Islamic activists, like the Muslim Brotherhood. “They want to satisfy the West, and they don’t want to satisfy Muslims,” he told me the next morning. “They say, ‘We’re a modern Islam.’ But there’s no such thing as modern Islam. There’s Islam, and there’s secularism.” We debated the imposition of religious law and whether Christians and Muslims could intermarry. For the first time since I met him, Abdullah grew angry at me, when I suggested that no Christian or Alawite would subscribe to his vision of the state he would build in the wake of the revolution. He quickly cooled, aware that he shouldn’t show his emotions. At one point, he even suggested that however he might feel, however draconian he believed religious law should be, he was still a minority in the opposition. As much as the activists here talk of unity in the face of government oppression, I often felt as I did in Iraq in those early months after the American invasion in 2003. The more people denied their differences, the more apparent they became. For Iyad, Abdullah and others, there was deep anger at Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite movement that has baldly supported the Syrian regime. That anger had spilled into chauvinism against Shiite Muslims, intensifying the hostility they already felt for Alawites. They understood the importance of nonviolence, but even Abdullah admitted that if Assad fell, sectarian vendettas would erupt in the countryside. One of the young men warned darkly that events “were headed toward violence.”
