April 13, 2009 archive

1. The NY Times reports Soldiers bridge two stages of war in Afghanistan.

   Afghanistan has long been a land of invisible but broadly understood boundaries. If you go here, it will be friendly. If you go there, you will be attacked. There are places where almost no outsiders go at all.

   With more military units expected, the many dangerous seams outside of the control of the Afghan government, like the Taliban-run area around Wanat, could in time have a regular American presence or a fixed outpost, several of the company and battalion’s officers said. And then, patrol by patrol, the Taliban could be undermined, and the complicated geography of informal boundaries could be eroded.

   These changing expectations have made the soldiers now on the ground a bridge from the older war to a fight that stands to become more invigorated, and hopeful, albeit perhaps more bloody as American units push into longstanding Taliban sanctuaries.

Four at Four continues with Somali Islamists applaud acts of piracy, prosecuting small time Iraq and Afghanistan, reconstruction money crooks, update from Thailand, and police preemptively arrest greenhouse gas protesters in the UK.

Have We Hit the Limits of Human Population? – Alternet

The last 200 years of economic growth have been based on a monumental Ponzi scheme that has pushed us toward the ultimate tipping point.

Poor prognosis for our planet – Sydney Morning Herald

The world has about a decade left to sort out the climate-change mess. John Collee sees lessons from his medicine days as parallels for the future of our planet.

Every patient with an incurable illness will ask how long they have to live. The answer goes something like this: “No one can say how long you may live, because every individual is different, but focus on the changes you observe and be guided by those. When things start changing for the worse, expect these changes to accelerate. So the changes that have occurred over a year may advance by the same degree in a few months, then in weeks. And that is how you can judge when the end is coming.”

Breaking the silence about Spring – RealClimate

Did you know that in 1965 the U.S. Department of Agriculture planted a particular variety of lilac in more than seventy locations around the U.S. Northeast, to detect the onset of spring – in turn to be used to determine the appropriate timing of corn planting and the like? The records the USDA have kept show that those same lilacs are blooming as much as two weeks earlier than they did in 1965. April has, in a very real sense, become May. This is one of the interesting facts that you’ll read about in Amy Seidl’s book, Early Spring, a hot-off-the-press essay about the impacts of climate change on the world immediately around us – the forest, the birds, the butterflies in our backyards.

Ice loss sparks new climate change fears – Financial Times

Evidence of ice loss from both poles this week has sparked fresh fears that global warming is progressing faster than scientists had predicted. Arctic ice has thinned dramatically, as well as shrinking in area, according to US research. Thin seasonal ice, which melts and refreezes each year, now makes up about 70 per cent of the Arctic winter ice, up from about 40 to 50 per cent in the 1980s and 1990s, leaving far less of the older, thicker ice that is harder to melt.

In the Antarctic, an ice bridge connecting an island to the Wilkins ice shelf – a sheet of ice about the size of Northern Ireland – shattered as scientists monitored it through satellite observations.

America’s loss of manufacturing prowess is widely lamented, but what is not widely understood is that our postmodern business culture has perfected the manufacture of a hugely profitable product: the loser. Losers are citizens who have been stripped of their independence by ignorance, poverty, addiction, and propaganda manipulation. Losers are a profitable product for the following reasons:

1. Losers are docile consumers, willing to buy almost anything, with low expectations for quality and service.

2. Losers can be loaded down with debt, because they can’t perform rudimentary arithmetic and will tolerate living as debt slaves.

3. Losers are politically passive because they are hypnotized by TV propaganda that tells them that they are OK.

4. Losers are easily addicted to highly profitable products and services like alcohol, tobacco, gambling, and fantasy entertainment.

5. Losers produce loser children, because they don’t value education and are too poor and stressed to raise their kids properly.

As the American economy contracts, the “winners” in our society will try desperately to increase the production of losers. If the supply of willing losers is insufficient, it may be necessary to turn the middle class into losers by debasing the currency and calling for national “sacrifice.” America’s winners, having perfected the manufacture of losers, will not readily abandon this highly profitable industry.

 A Tea Party for Stupidity

Americans stick to their guns as firearms sales surge

Amid fears that President Obama is planning a clampdown on guns, Chris McGreal reports from Culpeper, Virginia, on a new US arms race

Chris McGreal

The Guardian, Monday 13 April 2009

At the Guns and Ammo Warehouse they are reluctant to admit Barack Obama is right about very much. But customers enjoy the thought that his controversial campaign comment, that “bitter” small-town Americans are clinging to their guns, has proved more true than the president could have imagined.

Firearms sales have surged in the six months since Obama’s election as millions of Americans have gone on a buying spree that has stripped gun shops in some parts of the country almost bare of assault weapons and led to a national ammunition shortage.

The FBI says that since November more than seven million people applied for criminal background checks in order to buy weapons, a figure excluding the many more buying at thousands of gun shows in states such as Virginia, without facing any checks.

Clashes Over Thai Protests Intensify

Janesara Fugal contributed reporting from Bangkok

By SETH MYDANS and THOMAS FULLER

Published: April 13, 2009

BANGKOK — The Thai army clashed with demonstrators here early Monday after thousands of anti-government protesters defied a state of emergency, massing in the streets, climbing atop armored military vehicles and attacking the prime minister’s motorcade.

In one clash at a major intersection, soldiers fired shots from automatic rifles and tear gas at the protesters, who answered with gasoline bombs. The intersection leads to a major road out of the city.

The gunfire appeared to be aimed above the protesters; hospitals reported more than 70 injured, many from tear gas. Four of the casualties had gunshot wounds, including two civilians and two soldiers, according to a hospital official quoted by the Reuters news agency.

USA

An Early Military Victory for Obama



By Michael D. Shear

Washington Post Staff Writer

Monday, April 13, 2009; Page A09

It was one of the earliest tests of the new American president — a small military operation off the coast of a Third World nation. But as President Bill Clinton found out in October 1993, even minor failures can have long-lasting consequences.

Clinton’s efforts to land a small contingent of troops in Haiti were rebuffed, for the world to see, by a few hundred gun-toting Haitians. As the USS Harlan County retreated, so did the president’s reputation.

For President Obama, last week’s confrontation with Somali pirates posed similar political risks to a young commander in chief who had yet to prove himself to his generals or his public.

Hanging Out