The Passion...

Danish Muslim groups, some of which were responsible for publicising the cartoons in the first place, have since tried to calm the furore. Although neither Jyllands-Posten and Mr Rasmussen have apologised for printing the images, prominent imams in Copenhagen said yesterday they were shocked by the extent of the protests, which have let to widespread boycotts of Danish goods across the Middle East.

The Times | Six newspapers reprint Muhammad cartoons

While one must commend such a unified Arab and Muslim stance - hoping that it would remain confined to legitimate forms of protest - one cannot help but wonder: Where was such collectiveness when it was needed most?

This is not to suggest that transgression on a people's beliefs - any people and any belief - should be taken lightly. However, if Arabs can be so efficient in organizing such popular (and effective) campaigns that use economic, political and diplomatic leverage to extract concessions, then why the utter failure to carry out such campaigns protesting the US war on Iraq, its unconditional support of Israel and its condescending foreign policy and grand democracy charades it wishes to impose on everyone?

Asia Times | Punishing Denmark, the wrong enemy

Professor Tim Jensen, a prominent Danish theologian, said the caricatures should not be published, warning the newspaper "It will offend Muslims and only cause pointless provocation." A lecturer at South Denmark University, Mr. Jensen summarized his answer to Zaman regarding the Jyllands Posten newspaper: "Surely, Denmark has freedom of press, but pictures of the Prophet Mohammed have never existed throughout history. Any picture or caricature to be published will offend Muslims deeply. It would be provocation in a climate where Islam and Muslims are already in the limelight. It’s like pouring gas on the fire."

Zaman | Expert Warnings About Cartoons Went Unheeded

Context matters very much in the case of the cartoons of Muhammad too. It is one thing to assert the right to publish an image of the prophet. As long as that is not illegal - and not even the government's amended religious hatred bill makes it so - then that right undoubtedly exists. But it is another thing to put that right to the test, especially when to do so inevitably causes offence to many Muslims and, even more so, when there is currently such a powerful need to craft a more inclusive public culture which can embrace them and their faith. That is why the defiant republication of the cartoons in some parts of Europe (some of them with far less good histories of intercommunal relations than this country) is more questionable than it may appear at first sight.

Guardian | Cartoons and their context

Should a right-wing Danish newspaper have carried the derisive images of Muhammad? No. Should other newspapers have repeated them and the BBC teasingly “flashed” them to prove its free-speech virility? No. Should governments apologise for them or ban them from repeating the offence? No, but that is not the issue.

A newspaper is not a monastery, its mind blind to the world and deaf to reaction. Every inch of published print reflects the views of its writers and the judgment of its editors. Every day newspapers decide on the balance of boldness, offence, taste, discretion and recklessness. They must decide who is to be allowed a voice and who not. They are curbed by libel laws, common decency and their own sense of what is acceptable to readers. Speech is free only on a mountain top; all else is editing.

Simon Jenkins | These cartoons don't defend free speech, they threaten it

A South African court has banned the publication of controversial cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in the country's newspapers at the request of a Muslim organisation to cries of censorship from the media.

In a ruling issued late Friday, Johannesburg's high court banned main press groups from publishing the cartoons which since appearing in European newspapers have caused uproar in the Muslim world, Ebrahim Bham, the spokesman of the Council of Muslim Theologians said.

African News Dimension | South Africa : No Prophet Mohammed cartoons

Now that last one is just plain dumb. It'll be overturned. After President Mbeki telephoned his support to President Ahmadinejad, South Africa rightly sided with Iran at the highly theatrical IAEA meeting by refusing to support the farcical resolution referring that country to the UNSC. Support for Iran is overwhelming in this country, but it should not translate to misusing the law to fight provocation—as is the case with this high court ruling.

Cuba, Syria and Venezuela, which all have disputes with the United States, voted against it, while Algeria, Belarus, Indonesia, Libya and South Africa abstained.

Deutsche Welle | IAEA Overwhelmingly Votes to Send Iran to UN Security Council

As suspected, and claimed on this blog over the weekend, the inflammatory anti-Muslim cartoons published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten were a deliberate provocation designed to outrage and incite Muslims and thus engender support in Europe and America for the manufactured "clash of civilizations" engineered by the Straussian neocons. As Christopher Bollyn writes for the American Free Press, the neocon operative behind the cartoon scheme is Flemming Rose, cultural editor of Jyllands-Posten, who has "has clear ties to the Zionist Neo-Cons." Rose "traveled to Philadelphia in October 2004 to visit Daniel Pipes, the Neo-Con ideologue who says the only path to Middle East peace will come through a total Israeli military victory. Rose then penned a positive article about Pipes, who compares ‘militant Islam’ with fascism and communism," Bollyn reveals.

Kurt Nimmo | Flemming Rose and the Straussian Art of Provocation

The State of the Union

Reduces dependencies by up to 75 percent...

"US airplanes ... launched a raid on a village in near Peshawar after Eid al-Adha in which eighteen Muslim men, women and children were killed in what they call the war against terror."

"They said this was intended to kill myself and four brothers but now the whole world has discovered their lies and of their ruin and of their savagery in their war against Islam and Muslims."

"Butcher of Washington, you are not only defeated and a liar, but also a failure. You are a curse on your own nation."

"Bush, do you know where to find me? I am among the masses of Muslims, rejoicing in their support, their attention, their generosity, their protection and their participation in jihad until we conquer you with the help and power of God."

"My second message is to the American people, who are drowning in illusions. I tell you that Bush and his gang are shedding your blood and wasting your money in frustrated adventures."

"The Lion of Islam, Shaikh Osama bin Laden, may God protect him, offered you a decent exit from your dilemma. But your leaders, who are keen to accumulate wealth, insist on throwing you in battles and killing your souls in Iraq and Afghanistan and - God willing - on your own land."

"Your leaders responded to the initiative of Shaikh Osama, may God protect him, by saying they don't negotiate with terrorists and that they are winning the war on terror. I tell them: You liars, greedy war mongers, who is pulling out from Iraq and Afghanistan? Us or you? Whose soldiers are committing suicide because of despair? Us or you?"

"You, American mother, if the Pentagon calls to tell you that your son is coming home in a coffin, then remember George Bush. And you, British wife, if the Defence Department calls you to say that your husband is returning crippled and burnt, remember Tony Blair."

Al-Qaida Deputy Leader Ayman Al-Zawahiri

Biko Lives...

Whose weapon?

There's so many different worlds | So many different suns | And we have just one world | But we live in different ones.

Dire Straits | Brothers in Arms

My father, who professed himself a colonial, used to mutter of the First World: "Too much information; too little knowledge, and bugger-all wisdom." Despite his hard-wired European cultural heritage (the maxim derives from Eliot), he was an African at heart. In many ways, his cultural and visceral outlook replicated itself in me through the carrier DNA of his open-source culture. Although European, I am African. Being African, I'm happy with irony, ambiguity and paradox.

Steve Biko's above statement makes perfect sense to me.

Last Sunday evening, we dropped my youngest daughter off at the Lentegeur Adolescent Unit (LAU) in Mitchell's Plain on the Cape Flats. Fighting demons common to most teenagers, Cathryn stays at LAU during the week and comes home on weekends. An academic training facility, the LAU is the second largest adolescent psychiatric unit in South Africa. It caters for five adolescents.

And thereby hangs a tale involving a scurrilous local publication going by the name of Fair Lady [click link for article abstract], to which I have referred somewhat disparagingly in the past.

Because "Violet" is our daughter's friend and has, for up to six weeks, stayed with us, the article [Hormones, highs and hangovers] infers much that is way out of line. It also omits to mention all that is good, sensitive, and remarkably intelligent about our admittedly street-wise "Violet".

Shown exiting a Cape Town club, she and her boyfriend scored a couple of sandwiches and milkshakes out of their exploitation; seeminly designed purely to terrify white southern suburbs' mothers rather than get them to listen to their kids. Psychologists with whom she's had contact, other adults, family, interested school teachers, friends and, most importantly, her musician boyfriend shed no light on V's plight or the up side to this creative young girl's life.

Through its failure to accentuate—or elaborate on—the role adults play in creating such realities, the article loses the plot altogether. Possible answers to problems being experienced by kids, not written off with a 'bad prognosis' as 'V' has been, lie uncomfortably close to home, most often within the 'shocked' reader. There's very little wrong with our kids ('V' comes out of this a 'survivor'), but an examination of their criminal neglect by often clueless and usually overly wealthy parents would lead us to some hard answers worth reporting.

It's a shabby article.

We drove home towards the mountain in moderate traffic, swooshing along the national road past windswept miles of informal housing, shacks, and shanties built one on top of the other out of wood, tin, and plastic. Fire-blackened concrete barriers prevent cows, goats, horses, dogs, kids and idiots straying across the road, and mesh-covered pedestrian bridges stop rocks and other objects being lobbed at passing cars.

It's barren, featureless dune country, separating the Table Mountain granite outcrop of the Cape Peninsula from the Malmesbury shale of the great African continent. For most Capetonians, it's home.

A youngster of about nineteen was walking towards Cape Town along the large, concrete 'blast-barrier' separating inbound and outbound traffic. He was walking unconcernedly; ambling towards the city. He was naked. In our instant of passing, he showed no distress or concern. Unpainted and wearing no loincloth, he wasn't an abakwethu, or initiate. He was merely walking to Cape Town and, although I've remembered him, I've felt little concern for him. He probably arrived, unharmed, at his destination.

The contradiction inherent in my daughter finding one of five places at a state hospital in a city of millions, where teenagers wander the streets naked or drugged or raped or beaten, does not puzzle me. What does puzzle me is our apparent need for institutions qualifying other youngsters in social work, psychology, psychiatry, etc. in a sea of deprivation, poverty, and dire need.

For some reason—probably five years' exposure to his writing, I've a feeling my Spiritual Guide and Mentor Father Christopher (FC) and RageBoy would feel quite at home in Africa. Lacking Barnes and Noble, Starbucks and cheap telecoms, I'm not so sure about Chris Locke. But, as Father Christopher's stenographer and RB's batman, Locke has little choice in the matter. It is FC who is behind most of the lucid, revelatory prose emanating from the Jesus Bunker in Boulder, so we'll stick with him.

In his post on net² (submitted by Locke), FC states: "I hope my title slug above [Biko Lives] is warranted and that the code is getting down to the people who need it most and know best what to do with it."

He's a bugger, eh? He always knows which buttons to push and he always sets me to thinking (which explains his exalted status from Beijing to Brazil). And, usually, much like the man, the answers to his unstated questions comprise many, often paradoxical, but always interesting and thought-provoking parts. For the first part, I've never known FC to be a minor-league slugger. His evocation of Peter Gabriel's most beautiful song and, especially, the lyrics "Yihla Moja, Yihla Moja, | The man is dead | The man is dead" give the lie to any notion of throwaway lines.

Quoting Enoch Sontonga's Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika, adopted by the ANC in 1925 to close its meetings and as our national anthem in 1994, the hymn's exhortation to the Spirit ensures Biko's survival—despite the imperialism of two centuries being neatly but unobtrusively ensconced in its words. Gabriel too, incorporates ambiguity. "Come Spirit. Take the man, for he is dead?" Possibly, but I think not. "Come Spirit. This guy's had it. It's your turn now," is more like it.

In short, and more often in frustration and anger than resignation and submission, Biko lives.

However, and this is where FC is always at his most probing, whether Biko's legacy computes to a compatibility with or need for open source or proprietary software leads to some interesting questions. And to address them, we need to view Africa from afar. We've been blessed with many great leaders, before and since Steve Biko's time. In an excellent overview of the 20th Century, Gamal Nkrumah summarizes Africa's struggle to find itself. His prognosis, based on Mandela being the only great African leader to ring in the 21st Century, is undeservedly bleak and can be ignored.

However, forecasting a forbidding future, he begs a response. Riding out the storms of neoliberal economic policies foisted on newly independent countries by new and insidious imperial tools such as the IMF, World Bank, G8 and World Economic Forum necessitates a low profile. Thabo Mbeki, for his leadership of South Africa and the direction he gives other African countries, is hugely undervalued. If we need to amend the constitution to give the man and his team a third term, why not?

See the South African president's must-read blog entry on Hamas's election victory.

There's good reason for my buddy Thomas P.M. Barnett painting South Africa into the functioning Core of the Pentagon's New Map while relegating the rest of the continent to the dysfunctional Gap. Harnessing a superficial, paper-thin, broadcast media-friendly ideation of South Africa superimposed on harsh, unforgiving and incomprehensible realities, the new imperialists see the country as a springboard to Africa's untapped wealth.

Well, as they say, fuck 'em. We're busy. Mbeki and the ANC, sharing the sentiment, are playing it down the middle and balance external, predominantly economic threats against internal needs with finesse and élan.

Barnett and his neocon crazies will not have their way with us. To mangle Biko's statement: our mind is the most powerful weapon you have in your hands. Don't mess with it.

Besides Biko stands the ghost of Chris Hani, a man for these times. Centuries of interaction with our Arabic cousins have taught us the lessons of time and its tides. Despite the lingering legacies of negritude and xenophobia (racism is a nuisance we can deal with), this appreciation of the long term has led to a form of innate, continental 'consensus socialism'. It has and continues to serve us well.

Not for nothing can we absolve ourselves of crimes committed over the past two hundred years against the environment and the future.

An aside on racism. Local government elections are under way. The Democratic Alliance (the residue of formerly white parties and their collaborators) has strung the streets of Cape Town and its suburbs and townships with election posters shouting "End ANC Racism" and "Take Back Your City". Hah! Were the ANC to do the same, I've no doubt as to how DA supporters would respond.

Hani was particularly well suited to reading and responding to Western attempts to subvert and subdue African liberation movements for short-term economic gain. Why does his spirit and that of Biko live on? Because both men were expressions of the people they represented. Just as the elegant, eloquent calls for calm issued by Tokyo Sexwale (deployed with Cyril Ramaphosa to the private sector) in the wake of Hani's assassination reflected the disciplined demeanour of a bereaved country, so Africa's myriad outstanding leaders mirror their people.

Africa is a chameleon. We'll be whatever you wish us to be but, despite poverty, violence, AIDS, exploitation, unbelievable income disparities and the empty dreams of our present captains of commerce, we'll remain true to ourselves.

Well, most of us. Denied a socialist regime and a severe but necessary redistribution of wealth, the predominantly white private sector was the big winner in 1994 and continues to impose its will on and flaunt its lifestyle at the majority. But, while we pander to its whims, its power is waning. With China offering far better deals on oil, only a small percentage of white businesses, subject to their market forces, will last. And it's here, where we make our choices, that we can discern the future of computing in Africa.

And it's here too, that we should not forget the runners-up in the '94 elections, the NGOs. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) exist to serve ordinary South Africans where the state is unable to. Many do a remarkable and, all too often, unsung job. On the downside, many exist to give employment—frequently allocating the top slots to whites—to those who would otherwise be unemployable. State policy is, supposedly, given effect by these institutions. However, with the advent of democracy, everybody suddenly became a consultant and most consultants, charging exorbitant fees, came from the NGO sector.

These people hindered, rather than helped, solve identified problems; for example, illiteracy. The problem's hardly been dented, let alone addressed. Large commercial publishing houses, out of touch with social realities, employed literacy consultants to produce elaborate literacy packs designed solely for their shareholders' benefit. The packs might as well have been PCs. These days, there are far fewer such people about. Sadly though, we're now saddled with convention organizers and call centres.

While you (reading this) and I use a computer to communicate, most people need something faster, cheaper, better. (Hmm... we need Jeneane Sessum.) Denied fat, sedentary lifestyles and consumption-friendly disposable mentalities, 82 million Africans use a cell phone. Eh? Yeah. Kofi Annan hasn't a clue. The other half of the world just made a phone call. Most TV viewers cackled at the cell phone advertisement showing the ubiquitous beggar at the intersection losing his handout because he chose to answer his cell phone. I didn't. Vodacom and MTN deal in reality and big bucks. And the reality is that very few Africans own computers and even fewer are linked to the Internet or Web. If a couple of million put the Web to effective use, it's a lot. Generally, we don't need computers, software, WiFi, etc.

Whatever for? Large, expensive and clumsy, networks demand space, time, security, electricity and telephone lines. On a continent where society doesn't place too high a priority on such things, they're simply impractical. When school kids have few teachers, fewer books, no doors, windows, toilets, power points, phones and roofs in their educational institutions, what price computers? When rape, drunkenness, violence, prostitution, gangsterism and drugs are risk-free schoolyard activities, what chance their survival? Nada, zippo, zilch.

When hardware doesn't stand a chance, neither open source nor proprietary software enter the equation.

We've never really had a national education system. Too much division. Too much history. Another Western song to make it big in South Africa was Pink Floyd's Another Brick in the Wall. "We don't need no education | We don't need no thought control." It became the anthem of school kids countrywide during the '84 riots. The state's response? Shoot the kids and ban the song. Together with Jesus Christ Superstar, the Beatles, Kerouac, Hunter S. Thompson and, believe it or not, Anna Sewell's Black Beauty. Yeah, the story of the horse.

Many will disagree with me when I say there's little room in Africa for computing as we know it. To them, I say "Go read the Starfish Story." I share its sentiment. Do what you can. Think global, act local, etc. Your efforts are not in vain. Hell, as one who likes to write, cogitate and communicate, I don't understand our inability to link the continent to the Net. But at what price do we save the few and leave the rest behind?

Let's face it. The schools into which computer classrooms have been introduced; where open source or proprietary software are used, are the bright, shining exceptions that light our deluded fantasies of First World emulation. Like the psychiatric facility existing for the staff rather than the patients, these experiments in proliferating computers baffle me. It just ain't on. Like the formal-sector businesses that exist to entrench the wealth of our padrone class at the cost of the many, proprietary and open source code are more trouble than they're worth.

Computers and the code are "...getting down to [...] people who [...] know best what to do with it." But it's not getting to the people. And whether they need it most (or at all) is moot. Either way, most are denied it or don't want it. They have better things to do. Like survive.

Given that the spirit of Biko lives, let me put it this way. An oral tradition ensures Africans are natural communicators. If the Web were people, it would be us. Every type of network is evident in every city, village, and settlement. As social beings, we're suckers for tools facilitating communication. But, given our environment and living standard, pay-as-you-go cell phones make far more sense and are way more functional than PCs.

Though many might tell you otherwise, I'll go so far as to stating that this will be the case in any country or on any continent where the Golby Acid Test Ratio (I studied economics last night) is greater than .75. Okay, I'll explain. In any country where the unemployment rate comes close to matching or exceeds its citizens' life expectancy, I reckon any type of hard or software doesn't stand a chance of gaining wide acceptance or adoption.

The Golby Acid Test Ratio for South Africa, using the broad definition of unemployment, is .96. According to the Centre for the Study of African Economies at Oxford University, unemployment rose to 41 percent between 1995 and 2003. Life expectancy stands at 43. So the cell phone companies look set to continue reducing computing's significance to insignificance and irrelevance for some time to come. Or until we put open source onto affordable cell phones, at least.

I first heard Peter Gabriel's song, banned in South Africa, long after it was written; in about 1983. It was the right time for me to hear it, five years after Biko's brutal murder. It put into context the rage we, as white kids living in a legally segregated society, carried to our often ignorant but always passionate protests of a system denying our common humanity. During the white elections two months after Biko's death, Minister of Police, Jimmy "It leaves me cold" Kruger came down to Cape Town's working-class Maitland constituency to back a fresh-faced National Party candidate, Kent Durr.

Hundreds of predominantly English-speaking youngsters, mostly students up at UCT, out-manoeuvred the party faithful to pack the hall. We gave Kruger hell. Following the beat of a guy banging his motorcycle helmet against the wall, we did the usual, singing ridiculous songs, i.e. 'We Shall Overcome' (what freedom songs could we have known?) and chanting "You killed Biko." Drowned by the uproar, Kruger could not speak, called us "...a bunch of hairybacks pumped up by [our] lecturers and sent to disrupt this meeting", and the few security leatherfaces accompanying him could not handle the mob. They dragged out a kid who tore up his conscription card, but released him almost immediately.

Kent Durr won his seat by a landslide. Today, the U.S. beats a similar path towards Tehran.

All South Africans had been made intensely aware of the circumstances attending Biko's death by the media's publication of transcripts of the official commission of inquiry set up to whitewash his demise. Appearing for the Biko family, Sir Sydney Kentridge QC flayed the state witnesses, fully exposing the unthinking, mindless brutality of his interrogators and murderers, and the state for which they worked. Kentridge, as deserving of praise as Advocate George Bizos, is too seldom mentioned in Biko's biographies, attention being given instead to the medical profession's exculpation of those supposedly attending him.

In many ways, Kentridge was the Spirit invoked by Gabriel, for he gave Biko's work and philosophy a far wider audience than it would have otherwise enjoyed.

"It was the most extraordinary feat of advocacy I have ever seen," said Marcel Berlins, who covered the case for the Times. Sir Sydney managed to cross-examine the witnesses in Afrikaans while, almost simultaneously, summarising their evidence in English for the benefit of the world's press who were in attendance. His skill played a major part in exposing the horrific way in which Biko had been treated by the authorities, both police and medical, although the initial verdict returned was one of accidental death. more....

This is a long, circuitous rumination on Chris Locke's short post, but it highlights for me, and perhaps for you, how the legacy of Biko illustrates an inversion of my father's old maxim. Because we do not have the wherewithal to equip ourselves with the code needed to fully exploit the digital age, we face a paradox.

In Africa, we have bugger-all information and too little knowledge. But this seeming poverty is more than offset by millions of cell phones and an abundance of wisdom. In a sense, Steve Biko's greatest legacy is that most of us now live Biko lives.

Do you remember when we were in Africa?

The Doors | Wild Child

Note: This reflection on Chris's entry for net² has been a while in the writing. I've sinusitis, a headache, aches and pains; perhaps symptomatic of something far uglier than its constituent parts, I shall defer to the knowledge of doctors trained in Western medicine, the use of needles and the analysis of blood. Perhaps it's airconditioning, perhaps cancer. Perhaps I'm getting old. Dare I wear my trousers rolled? Does it matter?

When Smoking Kills...

From a distance... Cape Town 26-27 January, 2006

Up in smoke | That's where my money goes | In my lungs | And sometimes up my nose | When troubled times | Begin to bother me | I take a toke | And all my cares | Go up in smoke.

"Why might a plane continue to emit a high-pitched whine after landing at Cape Town International?"

"I dunno. The pilot left the engines on?"

"Nah. He turned them off."

"Fuck, I dunno then. Why might a plane continue to emit a high-pitched whine after landing at Cape Town International?"

"It's full of British tourists."

Ho ho ho. Or so 36-year old travelling Brit, Anthony Cooper, might have thought. Deciding to get even, he allegedly used a cigarette butt to set fire to the world's most distinctive landmark and killed a 65-year old hiker.

Apparently adding insult to injury, Magistrate Ingrid Freitag let the full-time car salesman and part-time tour-orrist from Brighton have his way with her. She released him on R3,000.00 bail—£277.50. Given former brother-in-law Jacques Freitag's alleged behaviour of late (and coincidental court appearance today), it might appear that she wanted to maintain a profile as low as that presumably now sought by suspected arsonist Cooper.

But all is not as it seems. I know Ingrid; she is not that kind of girl and I'd not impugn her professionalism. The concept of equality before the law does not take globalisation and the currency exchange markets into account. Were I to earn the same as a Brighton car salesman, I'd be as happy as a pig in shit.



Up in smoke | Donde todos es mi rey | There are no signs | Que dice no fumer | So I roll un "bomber" | Y me doy, un buen toke-ay | Y despues I choke | Y todos mis cares | Go up in smoke | Come on let's go get high.

Utimately, though, the joke's on the butt-flicking Englishman. Not only was his victim a 65-year old fellow British tourist; he got to spend a night in a South African holding cell—an experience MasterCard might describe as priceless. Nailed by Hoeriekwaggo (Table Mountain) trail guide, Donovan Lyimo, who probably earns less than £100.00 a month, Cooper will have to skulk about a while longer before once more facing Ingrid and charges of arson and culpable homicide.

And who knows? If found guilty of flaming Table Mountain, Lion's Head and Signal Hill, destroying half the world's silver tree proteas leucadendron argenteum, torching several houses and cars and, tragically, causing the needless death of an elderly hiker enjoying a summer-afternoon walk, the hapless Pom could ultimately marry a member of the 28s gang in a private ceremony held in the shadow of the mountain at Pollsmoor Prison.



The Portfolio Committee did not visit the Admissions Centre, which holds all adult offenders. This Centre is the most overcrowded in Pollsmoor. It has the capacity to hold 1 619 adult offenders and currently accommodates 3 989 adult offenders.

Report of the Portfolio Committee on Correctional Services on Visit to Pollsmoor Juvenile Detention Centres on 15 October 2004

Hell, anything's possible. It ain't over till it's over. He might even give up smoking.

Up in smoke | That's where I wanna be | 'Cause when I'm high | The world below | Don't bother me | When life begins | To be one long | And dangerous road | I take a toke | And all my cares | Go up in smoke.

Cheech and Chong | Up in Smoke

Thank you to the fire fighters, chopper pilots, tender crews, medics, volunteers, parks staff, 567 Cape Talk (which, in a day, has raised R1.4 million in disaster relief), and the supportive Cape Town public for doing so much to limit the damage caused by fire.

Safe Harbour

17h30 Friday, August 26, 2005 [click graphic to enlarge]

Spent last Sunday at Kalk Bay Harbour.

It's the last time I'll go there...

And the words that are used | For to get the ship confused | Will not be understood as they're spoken. | For the chains of the sea | Will have busted in the night | And will be buried at the bottom of the ocean.

...until perhaps this weekend. Over the past month, while on leave, we somehow gravitated to Kalk Bay. Unlike most of Cape Town, which lies on the other side of the peninsula, and although most of the fishermen have been deprived of quotas, it retains something of its past.

For tourists, it's the V&A Waterfront with a human face and a lot of soul. For locals, it's home. While yuppies crowd the restaurants, cafes and remarkable shops lining the old Main Road, you can find Cape Town's best fish and chips at Kalky's on the harbourfront.

Last week, I spent some time talking to Moses, a drunken fisherman soaking up the sun at the end of the harbour wall. He offered me R32,000 for my wife and bet me he could swim to Muizenberg, which we reckoned to be about "two sea miles" along the coast. The wind was howling across a green, white-capped sea and, although I bet he'd land up at Cape Hangklip on the other side of False Bay, Moses believed he could do the job.

One of his friends caught a pale, baby Great White shark and, as he swung the two-to-three foot fish over the wall, its fins gouged two gaping holes in another of their party's back. "Backstabber," muttered the drunken sot, giggling hoarsely under his whiskered breath. While they tended the wound, Moses asked me, "So Mike, what do you get twice in a week and once in a year?"

I have this thing going with one of the guys at the car park as well. He tells really shitty jokes ("If I told you I climbed an apple tree and came down with a pair, would you believe me?"), but he's okay. I thought long and hard on Moses's question. "Twice in a year and once in a week?"

"Naai, man, what do you get twice in a week and once in a year?"

He was slumped against the harbour light built in the first years of the last century, his mouth limp from sweet wine. It was about 10 a.m. Out at the reef, amid the kelp and swarms of gulls, four surfers rode a half-hearted swell, trying for a wind-blown three-footer. "Fuck it, Moses, how can you ask me that? 'What do you find twice in a week and once in a year?' How am I meant to know the answer?"

"Mike. Mike, tell me, where are you from?"

"Cape Town."

"Ja then, you'll mos know the answer."

"Mmm..."

Fishing families still work the harbour. Tough, leathered women scale, gut and carve harders, yellowtail and snoek with knives as keen as scalpels. They've special scrapers these days. They used to use pieces of wood with three or four bottle tops nailed to one end.

Speaking a loud, lyrically guttural and crude Cape Flats Afrikaans, several were giving an old fisherman hell. He'd snuck up on one of cleaning tables, pinched the bag of cheap wine hidden beneath it, and had stolen a couple of swigs. Vintage curses mixed with laughter confounded tourists photographing the fat seal rolling in the bottle-green water between the boats and the quay.

"Mike."

"Ja."

"Give me a smoke, man."

"No. That's crap, Moses, and you know it. It's ten bucks a pack and I can't afford it. Why should I give you one if I can't give one to the other guys?"

He held out a R1.00 coin.

"Here."

I lit a couple of cigarettes in the windless alcove afforded by the harbour light doorway and ignored the money. Between the century and year painted white on red above the door, somebody had written HIP2B². It's one of Mark Shuttleworth's open source initiatives.

A typically Capetonian piece of graffito. Old ideas. Old media. Very polite. I passed Moses his cigarette.

"I don't sell singles."

"No, thanks, Mike. But your wife is nice, man. R32,000."

"Fuck you, Moses. Where are you going to get R32,000?"

That stumped him.

"Twice in a week and once in a year?"

"Ja."


Clinging to a past worth preserving... [click graphic to enlarge]

A song will lift | As the mainsail shifts | And the boat drifts on to the shoreline. | And the sun will respect | Every face on the deck, | The hour that the ship comes in.

The sun burned with a stinging heat. My arms were beaded with sweat. Alvin occasionally came over and filled Moses's glass of cheap sherry. He offered me some. Eyeing the tourists filling The Brass Bell across the water, I wondered at their idiocy, packing themselves like sardines into an overpriced drinking hole, and declined.

Moses's friends were using heavy rods and their ability to cast left me in no doubt they'd been doing this for years. They came through from Retreat—Lavender Hill, most likely. It turns out Moses has a sister teaching school in Kenilworth. He has one teaching school in Elands Bay as well. Somewhere else too.

"Mike. I took Monday off work."

"But today's Wednesday, Moses."

"Ja."

He says he's working on the Majestic Hotel restoration project as an 'interior decorator'. He qualified in 1984. We lived a while in Kalk Bay back then. We had a single room above the bottle store and what is now the Olympia Cafe. We'd join the drunks on the balcony at sunrise and look out over the bay.

Hell, I first got stoned at Kalk Bay. I was about fifteen. We were staying at Zonker's great-aunt's 19th Century seaside house around the corner and came down to the harbour in the evenings. On one occasion, around sunset, a couple of fishermen working one of the boats offered us a smoke. Taking an old Coke tin in calloused hands, the old man rammed a wad of dope into its open mouth, punched a hole in the side with a marlin spike and, sucking at the hole, fired the wad with a couple of matches.

It made for a long, cool smoke.

I believed Moses's story. He could well be an interior decorator of the artisan type—a painter. The old Majestic bar used to be one of the only pubs in Cape Town that would sell alcohol to kids under eighteen. It had spittoons. Today, with the former Kings Residence next door, it's an imposing hulk being reborn as an upmarket, and tastefully ostentatious, tourism 'hideaway'.

Liqour outlets in Cape Town will serve anybody, of any age, these days.

Moses probably hadn't been missed at the construction site. A couple of days before I'd found a couple of dust-caked workers sleeping the morning away between the shore-side harbour wall and breakwater.

"'E'. You get 'e' twice in a week and once in a year."

Moses was stunned. Spittle dribbled from the side of his mouth and he tilted slightly more sideways as he squinted up at me.

"Jissus, are you a professor?"

"Uh-uh. I'm a Capetonian."

He chortled. I looked at him, drowning in the sun. Off the wall, the ocean held sway, the sea lifting paint-chapped trawlers on its segueing swell. Gulls wheeled on the wind and a couple of boats came in to epithets thrown them from the quay. One of Moses's buddies was swiftly cutting up the shark, throwing most of it off the harbour wall and keeping the rest for bait. Wendy had her face turned to the mountain and to Heaven, soaking it all in.

"Moses, what do you get seven times in a week and once in a year?"

I was messing with his head. It was always going to be beyond his drunken stupor.

Slowly... "Seven times in a month and one time in a year?"

"Seven times in a week and once in a year."

His response came quickly.

"A day. You get seven days in a week..." He tailed off into somnolence.

About ten minutes later, he asked me for another smoke. I took the money and gave him one.

We smoked in silence.

"Mike."

"Ja, Moses."

"Mike. Tell me. What do you get seven times in a week and once in a year?"

"'Y'."

"Because I want to know."

"'Y'."

"You asked me the question. Now I want the answer."

"'Y'."

Moses was getting upset. "Naai, man, Mike, don't be..."

"You get 'Y' seven times in a week, Moses. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. And only once in a year."

He looked confused for a couple of seconds before his face lit up.

"Ja, ja, ja... you get seven 'y's in a week and one in a year."

"Yup. But the thing is, when you ask people and then have to give them the answer, you must just keep saying 'Y'."

"Why?"

"Because it drives them bevok. Like it did you."

He thought about it a while before cracking up. He was still repeating the joke to himself when we left. We promised to visit him at work, but I doubt we'll call. He'll probably be busy.

I'll look out for him this weekend though. And head for the other wall.

Then the sands will roll | Out a carpet of gold | For your weary toes to be a-touchin'. | And the ship's wise men | Will remind you once again | That the whole wide world is watchin'.

Bob Dylan | When the Ship Comes In

Considering the Alternative...

Before turning to Tehran...

Some have the impression that you are a reasonable people. But the majority of you are vulgar and without sound ethics or good manners.

Usama bin Ladin October 2003

Bin Ladin was, of course, referring to those who'd elected George W. Bush to the presidency rather than the representatives of good taste and refined discernment listed my blogroll, may Allah bless and protect you all. Americans, by and large—like most infidels, are a bunch of boors epitomised by the Mad Whore-mongering Satanic Dog in the White House.

George W. Bush and his gang of rabid neocon racoons are out of control. The United States knows no internal dissent and he rules by military diktat. Crazed by a need for booze and a good fuck, the demented freak has his evil eyes and sick intentions fixed on Iran. You're going in there, people, whether you like it or not [mp3 download: 11.4MB]. Why? Because George, Dick, Condi and myriad others think it a good idea. That's all, 'a good idea' handed them by several preceding administrations.

Well, why not? The world's largest reservoir of oil, the region tops the Resource War list. With global warning out of control, drowned continents and wasted deserts imminent, somebody has to take it. Why not the world's only remaining super power?

Hah... you naive, gas-guzzling fools and idolaters. You've been watching CNN again, haven't you? Since when has the U.S., a broken-back whore impossibly deep in debt, been a super power? It is a penny horrible country, a rancid, dollar-and-dime, tinpot dictatorship and banana republic run by foam-flecked jackals with syphilis of their brains, and it has been reduced to a state of quivering, trouser-wetting fear by one man and the Iraqi Resistance Army.

Who, you might well ask, is that man? Ah yes, you know the answer, don't you? He is the leader of al-Qa'ida—the world's OTHER super power—Usama bin Ladin. Face it. Bin Ladin and his sidekick, Raymond (sorry, that's not it) Ayman al-Dhawahiri, control your miserable, civil-liberties constrained, consumption-crazy, tax-bills-up-to-your-eyeballs lives. If the media is to be believed, he is the source of all your problems, has you in his pocket, and is squeezing you like a stress ball.

Then again, why believe the communist-inspired, east coast-controlled liberal media? Look to your leaders for answers. One by one, they'll troop out and declaim Usama bin Ladin as the greatest threat to world peace since Cain decided to do Abel (to this day, a blot on the escutcheon of all good Jewish families).

Bin Ladin, once a small-town terrorist thug known undeservedly for knee-capping cities, has been elevated to a status not accorded any country in the world. Having dragged BushCo into the Middle East like a rented mule, he is seen as a power capable of bringing down the mightiest nation on Earth. Despite botched assassinations and your 700 military bases scattered ill-manneredly across the globe—dark sentries of our ever-thinning arterial energy, he's been whupping yo' ass from Afghanistan to Indonesia to Spain to Britain to Morocco to Iraq and beyond.

Ask your congressman. He'll tell you.

But your innate arrogance, misguided self-aggrandisement and their resulting psychotic delusions are not why I am writing this blog entry. I am writing this to alert you to Mr. Bin Ladin's offer of a truce. Indeed. It demands your serious consideration. It is not a figment of the press's or your local politician's imaginations. It is the real thing and it is on the Web. Let's hand over to Usama, may Allah bless and protect him and his various investment portfolios.

"Over to you, Usama."

"Thanks, Mike. This thing on?"

"Yeah, yeah. Go for it."

"Ta. [clears throat] Listen to me, you cowardly, godless, goat-fucking scumsuckers..."

[cut]

"Okay, okay, I get it. [clears throat] This message is about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and how to end those wars. It was not my intention to talk to you about this [good job I intervened, eh? Ed.], because those wars are definitely going our way. But what triggered my desire to talk to you is the continuous deliberate misinformation given by your President [George] Bush, when it comes to polls made in your home country which reveal that the majority of your people are willing to withdraw US forces from Iraq.

"We know that the majority of your people want this war to end and opinion polls show the Americans do not want to fight the Muslims on Muslim land, nor do they want Muslims to fight them on their [US] land. But Bush does not want this and claims that it is better to fight his enemies on their land rather than on American land. Bush tried to ignore the polls that demanded that he end the war in Iraq.

"We are getting increasingly stronger while your situation is getting from bad to worse. The war in Iraq is raging and the operations in Afghanistan are increasing. In response to the substance of the polls in the US, which indicate that Americans do not want to fight Muslims on Muslim land, nor do they want Muslims to fight them on their land, we do not mind offering a long-term truce based on just conditions that we will stick to.

"We are a nation that Allah banned from lying and stabbing others in the back, hence both parties of the truce will enjoy stability and security to rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan, which were destroyed by war.

"There is no problem in this solution, but it will prevent hundreds of billions from going to influential people and war lords in America — those who supported Bush's electoral campaign — and from this, we can understand Bush and his gang's insistence on continuing the war.

"If your desire for peace, stability and reconciliation was true, here we have given you the answer to your call."

al-Jazeera | Bin Laden offers Americans truce


...consider the alternative.

My dear old mother always said there was place for me in the diplomatic corps, but this is the biggest and best deal I've been able to broker. It knocks the Begin / Sadat and Arafat / Peres / Rabin deals into a cocked hat. In fact, De Klerk and Madiba will probably be calling me shortly. Who the hell are Tutu and Luthuli now? Stockholm, here I come.

Sorry...

Yup... this is a settlement hammered out in Heaven (virgins included). You'd be mad not to take it. Look at it this way. What's in it for you if you ignore it? Iran? What's going to happen once the Israelis, backed by the USAF and the U.S. taxpayer, go in there with their tactical nukes (or 'bunker busters' as they'll be called)? All hell is going to break loose. The Iranians are a moderate and gentle people, but push them too far and they'll go ballistic. Literally.

They'll have good reason to. With some twenty-five nuclear facilities dotted around the country, any takeout is going to have to be a whopper. Problem number two. Take a look at Isafahn, one of Bush's so-called problem sites (not that he gives a shit about nuclear sites—he's into destroying infrastructure). The city, home to cultural museums and antiquities beyond the ken and comprehension of the average redneck, is a low-resolution blur on Google Earth. There's good reason for this. It's a massive fucking city. And it's only a couple of miles from the high-resolution nuclear facility stuck behind an outer-city hillock.

Google, which does no evil, doesn't want you to see any either. Come the onslaught, the good citizens of some forty major towns and cities are toast. Teheran's mistake, believing nuclear facilities mattered, was positioning them close to its people. As a pretext for knocking out infrastructure serving the oil industry (the Yanks really couldn't give a damn who has the Bomb), they're perfectly placed for BushCo's War of the Worlds. The Dresden, Coventry (which my next-door neighbour, then a teenager, could see burning from Birmingham) and Tokyo firestorms will look like dry runs come the northern Summer.

This will not go down well in the Arab world. Or Moscow, Beijing and Pyongyang for that matter. Millions of dead Muslims? Nor will it be a repeat of the Native-American genocide (as, I've no doubt, most Americans quietly hope it will be). Indonesia and the Philippines will explode, Pakistan will implode and a howling, raging, never-say-die beast will rip its way towards Bethlehem to avenge itself and bathe in the blood of Israel. RPGs will smack into chemical trains running through DC, shoulder-fired missiles will bring down commercial air liners across the U.S.A. and Europe, and apartment-based Katyushas built from aluminium tubes will level formerly quiet suburbs. Suicide bombers will lurk in every underground and poison gas will cloud the air. Mortuaries will overflow and the stench of rotting flesh will be everywhere.

It will not be pleasant.

Your newfound allies India and Japan, with Russia, China, Australia and the whole E.U. mob, will turn on you overnight and pledge to rebuild the Middle East once you've been hounded out of town. Oil will be quoted only in Euros and the U.S. will be called on to repay its foreign debt.

It will all be over in a couple of months. And you'll not have done a thing to cocoon yourselves from peak oil, food, water or global warming (although it might cause Israel's theological Howard Stern to shut the fuck up). Which, when all is said and done, is what this is all about.

Usama, a peaceful man, knows all this, but threats are not his stock in trade. To his credit, he allows for intelligent life in North America. Dr. al-Zawahiri, a poet and gentle soul, does too. Allah's wrath is mighty, but even He will not allow 290 million Americans to fall on their swords. Will he? If I were in your shoes, I know what I'd do. I'd reconsider his offer. Do not listen to this Scott McClellan fool. He is paid to say these things.

If I were you, I'd get the hell out of the Middle East, dismantle the garrisons, torture chambers, black holes, bunkers and prisons, and bring the troops, spooks and kooks home. If you're that fond of Israel, take it with you and put it to good use for a change—blocking hurricanes or something.

But it's all up (or down) to you. Here are your shoes back; thanks for the loan. If you want tens of millions of angry Semites vigorously applying their leather soles to your faces, be my guest.

"In conclusion, I say to the American people we will continue to fight you and continue to conduct martyrdom operations inside and outside the United States until you depart from your oppressive course and abandon your follies and rein in your fools."

Usama bin Ladin October 2003

Bombing al-Jazeera

Tonight BBC's Newsnight [mp3 download 1MB] reported that al-Jazeera have filed a new Freedom of Information Request with the UK government about Bush and Blair's conversation about bombing al-Jazeera.

"Thank you for your email of 24 November in which you request a copy of any memos or notes that record President Bush's discussions with the Prime Minister about the bombing of the al-Jazeera television station in Qatar. Your request has been handled under the Freedom of Information Act 2000.

"I can confirm that the cabinet Office holds information which is relevant to your request."

It is gratifying to find out Newsnight confirming our argument [almost verbatim], but also it confirms how sorely lacking the rest of the mainstream media have been in their coverage of developments in this story. See also the lack of national media coverage of Peter Kilfoyle's disclosures of last week.

Tim Whewell's analysis that the government is coming under repeated and sustained pressure to release the document under three fronts, parliamentary efforts, the Keogh and O'Connor Trial and the FOIA requests is reassuring. As time goes on, it is looking less and less likely that the memo will stay hidden. more...

Here's al-Jazeera's take on the situation today:

The British government has denied allegations that a memo of a conversation between the British prime minister and the US president included the suggestion of bombing Aljazeera. The denial came on Tuesday even as the British government turned down a request from Aljazeera for access to the memo containing the reported communication between Tony Blair and George Bush.

Blair's spokesman said: "We will reply properly in terms of any request to us, but it is not the practice and will not be the practice to release conversations between the prime minister and other world leaders. But what we can confirm is that the memo does not refer to bombing the Aljazeera station in Qatar, despite the various allegations," he said. "I am not aware of any suggestion of bombing any Aljazeera station."

[...]

Peter Kilfoyle, a member of the British parliament, said last week he had been briefed on the memo by former MP Tony Clarke who had seen it, saying it had included a discussion of bombing Aljazeera.

al-Jazeera | UK denies Aljazeera bombing plot

Bush Unplugged...

George W. Bush Special Rendition...

In other words, this initiative is a broad-gauged initiative that deals with the defense aggressive war of the country, the diplomacy threats of the country, the intelligence black ops to defend conduct war for our country, and the education indoctrination of our people. And it's an important initiative, and I'm going to tell you why in a second. But thank you for joining your — together to make this happen.

more...

Yeah, it's George W. Bush Unplugged. A special edition rendition to boot. Get it while you can...

...MLK Unplugged...

"But dere iz somethin' dat I mus' say ta muh ma fuckin peeps, who stand on da warm threshold which leads into da palace o' justice: In da process o' gaining our rightful place, we's mus' not be guilty o' wrongful deeds. Let us not seek ta satisfy our thirst fo' freedom by drinking from da cup o' bitterness an' hatred. We mus' forever conduct our struggle on da high plane o' dignity an' discipline. We mus' not allow our creative protest ta degenerate into physical violence. Again an' ag'in, we's mus' rise ta da majestic heights o' meeting physical force wiff soul force. An' don't make me pull mah gat!

"The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed da Negro community mus' not lead us ta uh distrust o' all whitey peeps, fo' many o' our whitey brothers, as evidenced by they presence here taday, gots come ta realize dat they destiny iz tied up wiff our destiny. And dey gots come ta realize dat they freedom iz inextricably bound ta our freedom. Don't make me come ovah there bitch..."

more...

Changing mood completely, but sticking with the Unplugged theme, Stu Savory brings it all back homey for American civil rights icon, Martin Luther King Jr.

...and Sharon Unplugged

You wish.

Note: Blame Brian for this last entry in the Unplugged series...

Waiting for the Barbarians...

Blind, Deaf, Dumb and Deluded...

"There must be some way out of here," said the joker to the thief, | "There's too much confusion, I can't get no relief. | Businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth, | None of them along the line know what any of it is worth."

In addition to an increase in the number of SWAT teams, their roles have expanded. Traditionally utilized for highly specialized action, such as barricaded suspects and hostage situations, the teams are increasingly engaged in traditional police work, especially work related to anti-drug efforts. The research shows that between 1990 and 1995 SWAT units were employed in their traditional roles for only a small number of occasions. Instead 75% of their activities were devoted to serving "high risk" warrants, such as "no-knock" warrants, mostly drug searches. "In SWAT units formed since 1980, their use has increased by 538 percent," said Kraska. He added that such units are now being deployed as full-time roaming patrols.

The SWAT teams wear camouflage, body armor and gas masks, and use weapons such as diversionary "flashbangs" (a diversionary device), submachine guns, explosives and chemical weapons. Kraska's survey shows that the SWAT teams receive training by active and retired military experts in special operations. Heckler and Koch, makers of the MP5 submachine gun used by the Navy Seals, also provide training to the SWAT teams. Some units also have helicopters and armored personnel carriers at their disposal.

National Drug Strategy Network | S.W.A.T. Team Use In U.S. Law Enforcement Dramatically Increases [1997]


Law and Order...

"No reason to get excited," the thief, he kindly spoke, | "There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke. | But you and I, we've been through that, and this is not our fate, | So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late."

Departmental SWAT teams have accepted the military as a model for their behavior and outlook, which is distinctly impersonal and elitist; American streets are viewed as the "front" and American citizens as the "enemy." The sharing of training and technology by the military and law enforcement agencies has produced a shared mindset, and the mindset of the warrior is simply not appropriate for the civilian police officer charged with enforcing the law.

The soldier confronts an enemy in a life-or-death situation. The soldier learns to use lethal force on the enemy, both uniformed and civilian, irrespective of age or gender. The soldier must sometimes follow orders unthinkingly, acts in concert with his comrades, and initiates violence on command. That mentality, with which new recruits are strenuously indoctrinated in boot camp, can be a matter of survival to the soldier and the nation at war.

The civilian law enforcement officer, on the other hand, confronts not an "enemy" but individuals who, like him, are both subject to the nation’s laws and protected by the Bill of Rights. Although the police officer can use force in life-threatening situations, the Constitution and numerous Supreme Court rulings have circumscribed the police officer’s direct use of force, as well as his power of search and seizure. In terms of violence, the police officer’s role is—or should be—purely reactive. When a police officer begins to think like a soldier, tragic consequences—such as the loss of innocent life at Waco—will result.

Cato Institute | Warrior Cops — The Ominous Growth of Paramilitarism in American Police Departments [1999]


Exporting Democracy...

All along the watchtower, princes kept the view | While all the women came and went, barefoot servants, too.

The Marines also had a hand in training the so-called Al Hillah special weapons and tactics (SWAT) team. Based on training received from the Marine force-reconnaissance units, Al Hillah is comparable to U.S. special operations forces. Force-recon Marines are experts in direct-action, close-quarter fighting and reconnaissance operations. The force-recon Marines started training a handful of specially picked men from the Al Hillah province. These soldiers receive training in marksmanship, tactics, but also mission planning and decision making. The SWAT team ran missions with the Marines in the province of Babil, the site of the ancient city of Babylon. The team now has 175 members. For additional experience, some of them have been training in Jordan. Other specialized units include the special police commando battalions, which represent the Iraqi ministry of interior’s strike-force capability. The commandos, ultimately to be composed of six full battalions, are vetted Iraqi officers and rank-and-file servicemen.

National Defense | Iraqi Special Forces Need More Training, Equipment [2005]

Outside in the distance a wildcat did growl, | Two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl.

Bob Dylan | All Along The Watchtower

Insufferable British Snobs...

T.E. Lawrence: The Seven Pillars of Wisdom

A senior British officer has criticised the US army for its conduct in Iraq, accusing it of institutional racism, moral righteousness, misplaced optimism, and of being ill-suited to engage in counter-insurgency operations. The blistering critique, by Brigadier Nigel Aylwin-Foster, who was the second most senior officer responsible for training Iraqi security forces, reflects criticism and frustration voiced by British commanders of American military tactics. What is startling is the severity of his comments - and the decision by Military Review [pdf 1.2MB], a US army magazine, to publish them. ... Brig Aylwin-Foster's criticisms have been echoed by other senior British officers, though not in such a devastating way. General Sir Mike Jackson, the head of the army, told MPs in April 2004 as US forces attacked Falluja: "We must be able to fight with the Americans. That does not mean we must be able to fight as the Americans."

[...]

Colonel Kevin Benson, director of the US army's school of advanced military studies, who told the Washington Post the brigadier was an "insufferable British snob", said his remark had been made in the heat of the moment. "I applaud the brigadier for starting the debate," he said. "It is a debate that must go on and I myself am writing a response."

Guardian | US army in Iraq institutionally racist, claims British officer

I wonder what my friend Tom Barnett, the author of The Pentagon's New Map once heavily involved in Force Transformation and now itching to blog from Teheran, would say to the above.

On the eve of the war in Iraq, Barnett predicted that taking Baghdad would not be about settling old scores, or enforcing disarmament of illegal weapons. Rather, he wrote, it “will mark a historic tipping point—the moment when Washington takes real ownership of strategic security in the age of globalization.”

Jim Lobe | Pentagon Moving Swiftly to Become “Globocop”

Ostensibly an open-ended critique of the U.S. Army's inability to respond appropriately or effectively to the counterinsurgency (COIN) following Phase 4 of Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF), British Army Brigadier Nigel Aylwin-Foster's paper, Changing the Army for Counterinsurgency Operations, is the most scathing, but potentially constructive, document to come out of the illegal invasion and attempted occupation of Iraq. Suitably understated and ambiguous—and laced with wry, cutting compliments, it shreds all hope any U.S. ally might have of the American army filling the stated mandate given it by its Pentagon-controlled political masters.

Offering compelling reason to change both the American worldview and way of life, the British officer points out that military culture is born of social norms and values and, to be successful, military objectives should always subordinate themselves to political ends. Showing 'force transformation' to date to be the fundamentally flawed results of systemically self-serving institutions of delusion, Brigadier Foster hints at just how difficult it will be to turn the average American recruit into an effective soldier—if, indeed, it can be done. Using the demented Soldier's Creed to good effect, he points out that being a soldier takes a damned side more than a blind commitment to becoming a high-tech, unthinking warrior hell-bent on obliterating one's painted enemies (and all unfortunates in their vicinity). Brigadier Foster finds the military—and, by extension, the society it represents, sorely wanting; rendered ineffective by:

"...a combination of enduring, longer term factors, compounded by shorter term, transient factors which have collectively conspired to render the U.S. Army conceptually and culturally ill-disposed to OIF Phase 4, and similarly ill-disposed to adapt to the extent required, and thus ironically ill-suited to the path determined for it de facto by U.S. Foreign Policy at the beginning of the 21st Century."

In other words: "Listen chaps, if you're to stop making such asses of yourselves, you'll have to try again. From scratch."

If I were to fault Foster, I'd accuse him of presupposing intelligent life in the White House and Pentagon. He fails to consider a mindset believing these to be the End Times, an apocalyptic era calling for global resource grabs and the obliteration of naysayers. While, for the sake of all of us, the Brits and other nation states tend to play by the rules—no matter how ugly they may be, the U.S. administration, riding the compliance of its populace, realises it can make them up as it goes along; or do away with them altogether. It seems that, in the American psyche, life is a movie. It ends with a bang, not a whimper.

Observers will note that Barnett’s arc of instability corresponds well to regions of great oil, gas, and mineral wealth, a reminder again of Wolfowitz’s 1992 draft study. It asserted that the key objective of U.S. strategy should be “to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power.”

Jim Lobe | Pentagon Moving Swiftly to Become "Globocop"

The Arabic-speaking areas of Asia in this sense were a rough parallelogram. The northern side ran from Alexandretta, on the Mediterranean, across Mesopotamia eastward to the Tigris. The south side was the edge of the Indian Ocean, from Aden to Muscat. On the west it was bounded by the Mediterranean, the Suez Canal, and the Red Sea to Aden. On the east by the Tigris, and the Persian Gulf to Muscat. This square of land, as large as India, formed the homeland of our Semites, in which no foreign race had kept a permanent footing, though Egyptians, Hittites, Philistines, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Turks and Franks had variously tried. All had in the end been broken, and their scattered elements drowned in the strong characteristics of the Semitic race.

[...]

We pay for these things too much in honour and in innocent lives. I went up the Tigris with one hundred Devon Territorials, young, clean, delightful fellows, full of the power of happiness and of making women and children glad. By them one saw vividly how great it was to be their kin, and English. And we were casting them by thousands into the fire to the worst of deaths, not to win the war but that the corn and rice and oil of Mesopotamia might be ours.

[...]

For my work on the Arab front I had determined to accept nothing. The Cabinet raised the Arabs to fight for us by definite promises of self-government afterwards. Arabs believe in persons, not in institutions. They saw in me a free agent of the British Government, and demanded from me an endorsement of its written promises. So I had to join the conspiracy, and, for what my word was worth, assured the men of their reward. In our two years' partnership under fire they grew accustomed to believing me and to think my Government, like myself, sincere. In this hope they performed some fine things, but, of course, instead of being proud of what we did together, I was bitterly ashamed.

It was evident from the beginning that if we won the war these promises would be dead paper, and had I been an honest adviser of the Arabs I would have advised them to go home and not risk their lives fighting for such stuff: but I salved myself with the hope that, by leading these Arabs madly in the final victory I would establish them, with arms in their hands, in a position so assured (if not dominant) that expediency would counsel to the Great Powers a fair settlement of their claims. ... I risked the fraud, on my conviction that Arab help was necessary to our cheap and speedy victory in the East, and that better we win and break our word than lose.

[...]

The only thing remaining was to refuse rewards for being a successful trickster and, to prevent this unpleasantness arising, I began in my reports to conceal the true stories of things, and to persuade the few Arabs who knew to an equal reticence. In this book also, for the, last time, I mean to be my own judge of what to say.

T.E. Lawrence | The Seven Pillars of Wisdom

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

My family tends to be genetically challenged. Well, that's what the geneticists would have us believe. My wife and I both have blue eyes and, as kids, we had blonde hair. Mine grew darker during adolescence (I blame the drugs) and my wife's when she started manufacturing mouths for me to feed. Well, that's what she says. I still blame the drugs.

Either way, we remain genetically blonde haired and blue eyed. And left handed for good measure.

Being thus afflicted, we were obliged to pass our 'recessive' genes on to our kids. We had, apparently and so the textbooks told us, no choice in the matter. It is the way of the world and Mother Nature. It ensures we will always stand out in a crowd. So, much as my youngest would like to be 'different'; dyeing her hair black, cutting up her clothes, sticking pieces of metal through her nose, lips, ears and other strange body parts she is, like her brother, sister and parents, blonde haired and blue eyed.

None of our kids are left handed, which proves science does sometimes get it right.

But all this is besides the point. The point is that I, a blogger, cannot resist a good 'blonde joke'. And Frank Paynter, the devious old bastard, offers the best blonde joke ever. In fact, the whole family—bar my eldest daughter—found it irresistibly... nay, side-splittingly funny. Eldest daughter is studying archiving and likes to retain a certain composure. Anyway, after cracking up, she regains her strait-laced look of disdain, feigns distaste and asks, "Why do so many women have bruises around their belly buttons?"

My wife and I, still laughing, can't figure this one out. "I dunno," I chortle. "Why do so many women have bruises around their belly buttons":

"Because you get blonde males as well," she sniffs, and leaves the room.

It's good (and she is 20), but this joke—courtesy of Frank, is as good as it gets.